“Unlike most readers in Antiquity who read their books aloud, we have developed the convention of reading silently. This lets us read more widely but often less well, especially when what we are reading—such as the plays of Shakespeare and Holy Scripture—is a body of oral material that has been, almost but not quite accidentally, captured in a book like a fly in amber.”
― Whose Bible Is It? A Short History of the Scriptures
― Whose Bible Is It? A Short History of the Scriptures
“Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.”
― Meditations
― Meditations
“LIII
Abbott Palladius said: The soul that wishes to live according to the will of Christ should either learn faithfully what it does not yet know, or teach openly what it does know. But if, when it can, it desires to do neither of these things, it is afflicted with madness. For the first step away from God is a distaste for learning, and lack of appetite for those things for which the soul hungers when it seeks God.”
―
Abbott Palladius said: The soul that wishes to live according to the will of Christ should either learn faithfully what it does not yet know, or teach openly what it does know. But if, when it can, it desires to do neither of these things, it is afflicted with madness. For the first step away from God is a distaste for learning, and lack of appetite for those things for which the soul hungers when it seeks God.”
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“History without tradition has produced a historicism that relativized the development of Christian doctrine in such a way as to make the distinction between authentic growth and cancerous aberration seem completely arbitrary... Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”
― The Christian Tradition 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 100-600
― The Christian Tradition 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 100-600
“Scripture is a record of the same story, told again and again, in different ways but always with the same theme, for more than three thousand years. God loves man. Man betrays God. Then God calls man back to his friendship. Sometimes that call involves some very painful suffering, and for good reason. God respects our freedom. But he will not interfere with our choices or their consequences, no matter how unpleasant. As a result, the struggle in the human heart between good and evil-- a struggle that seems burned into our chromosomes-- projects itself onto the world, to ennoble or deform it. The beauty and the barbarism we inflict on one another leave their mark on creation.”
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S’s 2025 Year in Books
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