Lincoln > Recent Status Updates

in a weird swipe at universalism, author seems to say that the wrath of God is literal, not analogical. seems to subscribe to the "everything i don't like is heresy" branch of Orthodoxy

author seems to suggests that Christianity is in closer continuity with 2nd T Judaism than present day Rabbinic Judaism. Dubious. Christianity is closer to specific 2nd Sects, true, but early Judaism as a whole? Also author is not careful enough to distinguish plausible speculation from fact (such as claims St Paul practiced Merkabah Mysticism)

humanity is so naturally compatible with divinity that the
Son can be both fully divine and fully human at once without separation
or confusion, in one agent whose actions are all therefore at once fully
human and fully divine

To desire to know the truth, for instance, is to desire that everything opaque to the understanding in experience—everything that might defy thought’s overtures and importunities—progressively vanish, until mind and world together achieve perfect transparency one to the other

"And all those dwelling on the earth will make obeisance to him [the beast], everyone
whose name has not been written in the book of the suckling lamb who has been
slaughtered from the foundation of the cosmos.”

Christianity did not plunder Platonism. Chistian and Platonist traditions converged, because , because both were summoned by and aspired to a horizon of spiritual intimacy with the divine, one that for Christians is understood as the final realization of what was achieved in the person of Christ

That hidden source of the tradition’s life remains a real and unyielding standard[...]And yet, by the very same token, it remains hidden in the very act of judgment and thus can be the exclusive property of no individual or age. Anyone who arrogates to himself the power to say with absolute finality what the one true tradition is will invariably prove something of a fool, and usually something of a thug

In reaction to Guidi’s insistence that before issuing a definition
the pope had to investigate the tradition of the church, Pius broke
out with the famous words, “I, I am tradition! I, I am the church”
(Io, io sono la tradizione! Io, io sono la chiesa!)

Vérot, a bishop whose see
was in the American Deep South and who had entered it just as
the Civil War began, also recommended that the council condemn the proposition that blacks have no souls and are not members of the human race. His pleas got lost in a council moving
ahead on a course already difficult to change.

The body is a help to the soul that loves God, even when it is ill, even when it is dead, and
all the more when it is raised again from the dead:

...there is substantial evidence from a number of
sources indicating that prayer in the direction of a Meccan shrine
was not a standard practice among Muhammad’s early followers,
but this shrine and its veneration instead emerged only gradually as
a central focus of Islamic faith and practice...the original direction of prayer
for Muhammad’s followers was indeed Jerusalem...

...Muʿāwiya’s alleged fondness for Christianity as well as the glowing terms in which contemporary Christian sources describe him. John’s report that the Believers held the Christians in general and their monastics especially in honor seems to confirm what we have already seen in Ishoʿyahb’s letter,
written during the 650s in Adiabene, also in northern Mesopotamia...

"Nevertheless, in late ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, the sons of Esau is a title regularly given to the
Romans, and so one would imagine that this is also its significance
in this instance."

...Metatron the prince of the Presence answered him and said: “Do
not be afraid, mortal, for the Holy One, blessed be He, is bringing
about the kingdom of Ishmael only for the purpose of delivering you
from that wicked one [i.e., Edom/Rome]. He shall raise up over them
a prophet in accordance with His will, and he will subdue the land
for them; and they shall come and restore it with grandeur...

"one of my teachers discovered I had a crush on a certain girl. He gave me a little lecture, telling me: “Don’t get involved with girls. They’ll only bring you trouble.” Whether he was right or wrong, that particular instruction was out my other ear in record time. I wanted nothing more than exactly that kind of trouble."

Swamiji finally tires of my consulting him about Bhagavad-gita verses.“Just copy the verses from some other translation,” he tells me, discarding the whole matter with a wave of his hand. “The verses aren’t important. There are so many translations, more or less accurate, and the Sanskrit is always there. It’s my purports that are important. Concentrate on the purports."