Haley Baumeister > Recent Status Updates

so far so good - why had I never heard about this book??

"The Church has never accepted such a pragmatic view of ethics." LOL

*rubs hands together behind a tree*

"Say the thing that cannot be said. Say it three different ways if you need to, but say it. Shout it, or whisper it, or weep it."

"Knowing myths and how they align with our own experience can help us emerge from loss not bitter, but creative... They become a vessel for the catastrophic heaviness"

"We drift away from the pain until we are snapped back. We just don't know what to do with it until eventually we have little choice but to accommodate it. It diminishes, creates listlessness on every side, pushes us towards too much numbed sleep, hopeless shrugs and big old cries that seem to never stop. The body just has to do what it does."

"And I was small because I was broken in on myself, and broken in on myself because I was obliterated by loss. I just didn't look like it. Still had a cheery grin pasted on. Loss changes how food tastes, how mountains and fields look. It changes the sounds of words people say to us. Muffles them, sours them. It distances us."

“You are going to get stretched, deepened, walloped by the ghastly, redeemed by the holy. There will be moments when it appears all hope is lost and you have to experience what it feels like to continue to exist within that hopelessness… And you will likely bring two things back. Things that may seem very different but are completely entwined: a limp and a gift.”

"Being a cheerful hobbit, he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.”

"I have more need of thought than of sleep."
^ we've all been there

"One of these days someone is going to convince me that Barth was a great theologian."
-Ross Byrd
-Haley Baumeister

"Crucially, biological motherhood is justified in the New Testament not directly or immediately, but only with reference to Mary."

"...I had been given no guidance on how to live out a holy sexual life within marriage. Evangelicalism, as it turns out, has little say on that topic, echoing the secular view of sex as primarily recreational. The only key difference is that evangelicalism situates that recreational activity within marriage... I never heard, as an evangelical, sex spoken of in teleological terms.

"In this world, our bodies do not speak, because they have no intrinsic meaning to profess. They are not divine signs, but material objects, tools for us to wield. They are not part of a created order animated with divine intentionality. There is no givenness to our embodied humanity to which we are accountable. This is the world I used to inhabit, and I came to see that it is not, at its root, a Christian world..."

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. Not sure how MLA is being so nice with all of Barth's takes in this thing.

"The conception and birth of Christ from a virgin is a miracle: but is it a miracle that puts an end to procreation’s theological significance, as Barth contends, or one that offers procreation an eschatological consecration like that which marriage receives? "

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. Barth gettin on my nerves a bit, I'm not sure how MLA is being so nice. I want the substack takedown version of this dissertation.

"The conception and birth of Christ from a virgin is a miracle: but is it a miracle that puts an end to procreation’s theological significance, as Barth contends, or one that offers procreation an eschatological consecration like that which marriage receives? "

"In the entire ninety minutes of discussion, with multiple scholars presenting and an audience of female academics actively engaging, not once did anyone mention the fact that sex can result in pregnancy. It was as if we were operating within a world where that no longer happens, where new human beings emerge out of cabbage patches, or spring from men’s thighs, like Dionysus from Zeus."

"The myth of complete sexual freedom, complete autonomy, is based on male biology, and women can only pursue that ideal by doing violence to themselves."
^but violence to a man's biology is totally fine for some reason

"Funnily enough, I had received similar messages [as secular culture] within evangelicalism, where married sex is dangled like a ripe carrot in front of chaste singles: just make it through this time of abstinence, and then you can enter the marital wonderland of sex-on-demand, where all your desires will be met, and all your fantasies come true!"
lol

"...I see the old, the young, the fat, the poor, the clean, the weary, the grimy, the keen, all bent, all broken, in one way or another—all hungry and weak. All of these bodies, like a river rushing up, like a tide of human frailty and beauty and need, I watch them and long to be one of them, to enter the current with my thirst and my wounds, to be buoyed up—not moving, but being moved."

"There’s sort of a sickness of our age that treats our desires as godlike, infallible, one that confuses desire with conscience, what I ought to do with what I want to do."

footnote 126:

“Barth’s suggestion that procreation is impossible without sexual intercourse is a moment that betrays his limited technological imagination.”

“appreciation and critique” of Barth’s view? *rubs hands together* now we’re talking.

folks, it appears Barth had some bad takes

“Christianity simultaneously transcends optimism and pessimism and (paradoxically) deepens them, allowing us to approach the evils of the world with a practical seriousness that pessimism cannot muster, and to have a confidence about its fundamental goodness that optimism can merely mimic.”

"Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, ‘a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.’ Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness."

"But I must admit... that I hoped you would take to me for my own sake. A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship."