Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics

HT: Alan Jacobs (originally shared by triadic)

“The adolescent, excited at finding the wonderful Self, supposes that life now consists in expressing it for the edification of all others. Most of us are bored. Real work… is not self-expression, but its very opposite. St. John the Baptist’s ‘I must decrease but he must increase’ is embedded in all good work.”

Eugene Peters, The Contemplative Pastor

HT: James Witmer

HT: The Geek Fairy via Gina G. Smith

“In an age which has jettisoned all its traditions, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.”

Peter Kreeft

“The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.”

Madeleine L’Engle, Circle of Quiet

Image by Justin Gerard.

Here’s a section of N.D. Wilson’s excellent (and short) post on Stories As Soul Food. Read the entire thing here. This is one of the principal things God has been giving me over the last several years. I believe this kind of understanding is true, beautiful, good, and liberating. -Sam

N.D. Wilson…

A Mistrust of Magic?

Bible-believing Christians frequently have a deep mistrust of fiction. In particular, they have a deep mistrust of, ahem, magic. This is impossible for me to understand, partly because I was weaned on C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, but more profoundly because I was marinated in Scripture at a very young age (by my parents). And Scripture is full of . . . stories. More than that, Scripture is full of the miraculous and the amazing. “Throw water on the altar,” Elijah says. “Fire will still fall from Heaven.” A famous shepherd boy takes down an infamous six-fingered giant. Don’t let the long-haired man near a jawbone. Collect the animals and build a boat. Whatever you do, don’t listen to that serpent.

Bible pop-quiz: Did Pharaoh’s magicians really turn staffs into snakes? (Hint: yes.)

Christians serve the Man who walked on water. We serve the Man who could not be kept in the belly of the great fish, the Man who shattered the grave, and all alone, ripped the city gates off a place called Death.

Loathe the Darkness and Love the Light

Christians believe that this world is so much more than a mechanical soulless machine. And yet, we tend to tell our children stories that (we hope) will only speak to their intellects. We want to give them a list of facts to tick off, like we’re trying to communicate a party platform to new recruits, like they’re nothing but brains ready for programming. We feed their souls sawdust and are surprised when they drift away to other cooks (with different tales about reality).

Kids (and adults) don’t just need the truth in their heads — they need it in their bones. They need to know what courage looks like and tastes like and smells like before they ever have to show it themselves. They need to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly — heroes and villains can show them why. They need to loathe the darkness and love the Light.

“The moment that humility becomes self-conscious, it becomes hubris. One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time. Therefore, the act of creating–painting a picture, singing a song, writing a story–is a humble act? This was a new thought to me. Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.”

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn’t diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent.”

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“Without medicine we will surely die—we can’t live without it. This is why ‘polemical theology’ must be a required part of every theological curriculum. Yet we cannot live on medicine. If you engage in polemics with relish and joy—if polemics takes up a significant percentage or even a majority of your time and energy—it is like trying to live on medicine alone. It won’t work for the church or for you.”

Tim Keller

via Justin Taylor

More larger-than-short-quotes goodness today from G.K. Chesterton and his magnificent Orthodoxy.
This, too, is from Chapter 4: The Ethics of Elfland. Enjoy. 

   My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken
   certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse;
   that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of
   democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I
   believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to
   be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared
   with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and
   rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and
   rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny
   country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven
   that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised
   elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic
   beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon
   before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular
   tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush
   or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were
   supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is
   what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not
   "appreciate Nature," because they said that Nature was divine. Old
   nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that
   dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the
   dryads.


via: CCEL.org