Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Impossible love

.... 'In this is love, that we become pathetic nothings. Forlorn, forsaken, foolish, empty, and pathetic. Only so do we live. In any sense whatsoever. According to the gospel, the pathetic life of love is the only truth, the only way, and the only life."

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Economists and the quest for virtue

A Question for the Economists is a great article in which Harvey Mansfield talks sense about how we often take economic advice without thinking too much about what it means and how this economic crisis is part of that.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Led Zep in the CSI Sunday School

A long time ago when I was a Sunday School teacher, I had to teach something to my kids for the Anniversary program. So I decided to write up a song with the tune I really liked. The song was called, "A Stairway to Heaven" and I did not know who sung it. I loved the tune but did not know or could not figure out the words (this was long before Googling). In any case it reminded me about the vision of Joseph's ladder which he saw while running away from home.


I thought it appropriate to put this vision into words to this tune. Then I played the song to the children but they were not too enthusiatic about the song and about my being able to teach them. So they abandoned it and instead chose a song of their own to present.


Reading this made for a really interesting read of the history of that song.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

The story of the Trinity

This is something I have to learn by heart.
At the beginning of the fourth century, there were many models by which Christian theologians attempted to grasp the nature of the interrelations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and to determine to which of the three Persons—and in what manner—it was correct to apply the name “God.” Scripture made it impossible, of course, to deny Christ at least some ascription of divinity, and equally difficult to reject the divinity of the Spirit. But it was by no means clear to all that the three divine Persons should be understood as co-equally, co-eternally, or “co-essentially” one and the same God. Hence, the most appealing, intellectually sophisticated, and plausible fourth-century alternative to what would become Nicene orthodoxy was some variant of “subordinationism.” This was the school of thought (especially well established in the great city of Alexandria) that saw the Son and Spirit as derivative and lesser emanations of the Godhead of the Father—“economically” reduced versions of God mediating between the transcendence of the Father, who dwelt in light inaccessible, and the darkness of the material world.


Quoted from David B. Hart at First Things.