Kaitlin > Recent Status Updates

"We poor dwellers in history. . . . The haunting fact is that we are morally free."

"Does the word 'stranger,' the word 'alien,' ever have a negative connotation in Scripture? No. Are the poor ever the object of anything less than God's loving solicitude? No. Do the politics of those who claim a special fealty to the Bible align themselves with its teachings in these matters? No, they do not, not in contemporary America, certainly."

"In consequence, even if the emphasis in marriage returned to the civil contract as in the early Church, the expectation remained that it should be marked by some church ceremony."

"And, therefore, virtually for the first time, theological discussion of marriage and the family was conducted by those with practical experience of marriage: even by some women."

"[Women] were distanced from formal Latin intellectual training in doctrinal propositions or in the argumentative clashes of scholasticism, but they could still use their imaginations to enter divine hiddenness, in the free explorations of the human mind that stretch across world religions in the form of mysticism."

"There were always other voices."

"What does remain is a substantial contemporary literature of argument in favour of clerical marriage . . . . Its arguments were straightforwardly biblical, with no need to resort to typology or allegory, unlike the proponents of clerical celibacy."

"A censorious passing angel submitted a critical report on Coldingham to a particularly austere male member of the community; the specific wickedness seems to have consisted of accomplished weaving and oversleeping, plus 'feasting, drinking, gossip, and other delights.'"

"Everyone, male or female or eunuch, could reach God through the contemplation of icons whenever they sensed God calling them to it. Devotion to icons wherever they may be founds remains a form of sacred democracy in Orthodoxy, undergirding it against the powerful who would like to monopolize Christian allegiance."

"Indeed, it is perhaps only after 676 that we can speak unequivocally of a thing called Christian marriage affirmed by the Church[.]"

" At most celibacy had been an aspiration for a tiny minority of would-be philosophers, and, with vanishingly rare and partial institutional exceptions like the Vestal Virgins of Rome, Graeco-Roman culture produced nothing like a monastic community, any more than did mainstream Judaism."

"The necessity for procreation is not present at all in Paul's reluctant justifications for marriage."

"Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. . . . And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered."

"Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmering of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing /for a fact/. The only dependable things are humility and looking."

"The wheel is falling apart, but the revolution is intact."

"A good proofreader has no ambitions, no pride, no spleen. A good proofreader is a little like God Almighty, he’s in the world but not of it."

"America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit "

"Conscious deliberation and emotion regulation, the ability to control the experience and/or expression of emotions volitionally, may be relatively unique to adult humans."

"It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of those times that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations."

"As Gregory understood, evil has no power to hold us, and we have no power to cling to evil; shadows cannot bind us, and we in turn cannot lay hold on them. In the end, God must be all in all."

"We believe obscurely, hopefully, on the testimony of others."

"unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—which metaphysical tradition also says are convertible with one another, and ultimately with reality as such."

"For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us, to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair; and hence the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone."

" in us there is nothing that is not action, dynamism"

"After all, it would be possible for us to be saved as individuals only if it were possible for us to be persons as individuals; and we know we cannot be."

"Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you."

"And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own."

"The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety."

"Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?"