Christopher McCaffery

“What nuns don’t realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J. C. Penney pantsuits.”
― Walker Percy, Lancelot

“You were not able to find yourself in my persistent traveling on the theological one-way street. Who knows whether you might not have already been close to those monks of the nitrischen desert? I in turn am able neither to join nor be inclined to your high altitude flight in a beyond of philosophy and theology. I understand you as a Catholic Tillich (and as such much more interesting and full). It goes without saying that I will henceforth accompany you and your work—in a bewildering participation or rather in a participating bewilderment—and look forward to every contact with you.”
― D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Preoccupation

“One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“Only because our being and truth already belong to God can we avoid the nominalist temptation, where God arbitrarily and unexpectedly appears as a sheer act of will reversing creaturely being and commandeering our language miraculously from the outside such that nothing identifiably human remains of it.”
― D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Preoccupation