21 November 2013

Missing Books

A couple of months ago a kind and generous HA reader purchased two books for me from the Wish List.

They never arrived.

Sometimes used bookstores or individual sellers lose orders, or the orders get lost in the mail.

I'm reporting this b/c I don't want my Book Benefactor to think that I'm ungrateful due to the fact that they haven't seen a Mille Grazie!

The two books are:

Encountering Jesus, Encountering Scripture: Reading the Bible Critically in Faith

Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture: The Application of Biblical Theology to Expository Preaching

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19 November 2013

After a long day, three pleasant surprises. . .

An Ample Mendicant Thanks to the kind and generous soul(s) who sent three books my way from the Wish List:

The Four Codes of Preaching
Dear Life
The Experience of God

All of my Book Benefactors are in my daily prayers!
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No Go for Seminar

Well, I'm sorry to say that my Preaching to Nihilists seminar didn't make for the spring semester.

I'll just have to try for next year!
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Emily Dickinson: nihilist?

Could it be that Emily Dickinson was a nihilist?

By homely gift and hindered Words
The human heart is told
Of Nothing —
"Nothing" is the force
That renovates the World —


(#A 821)
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18 November 2013

Pope Francis: "the spirit of adolescent progressivism"

YIKES! I think Francis has been reading HancAquam! 



God save us from the "hegemonic uniformity " of the "one line of thought", "fruit of the spirit of the world that negotiates everything", even the faith.  This was Pope Francis' prayer during mass this morning at Casa Santa Marta, commenting on a passage from the Book of Maccabees, in which the leaders of the people do not want Israel to be isolated from other nations , and so abandon their traditions to negotiate with the king.

They go to "negotiate " and are excited about it. It is as if they said "we are progressives; let's follow progress like everyone else does". As reported by Vatican Radio, the Pope noted that this is the "spirit of adolescent progressivism" according to which "any move forward and any choice is better than remaining within the routine of fidelity". These people, therefore, negotiate "loyalty to God who is always faithful" with the king. "This is called apostasy", "adultery." They are, in fact, negotiating their values​​, "negotiating the very essence of being faithful to the Lord."

"And this is a contradiction: we do not negotiate values​​, but faithfulness. And this is the fruit of the devil, the prince of this world, who leads us forward with the spirit of worldliness. And then there are the direct consequences. They accepted the habits of the pagan, then a further step: the king wrote to his whole kingdom that all should be one people, and everyone would abandon their customs. A globalizing conformity of all nations is not beautiful, rather, each with own customs but united, but it is the hegemonic uniformity of globalization, the single line of thought. And this single line of thought is the result of worldliness."


And after "all peoples had adapted themselves to the king's demands, they also accepted his cult, they sacrificed to idols and profaned the sabbath. "Step by step", the moved along this path. And in the end "the king raised an abomination upon the altar of devastation". "But, Father, this also happens today! Yes, because the worldly spirit exists even today, even today it takes us with this desire to be progressive and have one single thought. If someone was found to have the Book of the Covenant and if someone obeyed the law, the king condemned them to death : and this we have read in the newspapers in recent months . These people have negotiated the fidelity to the Lord and this people, moved by the spirit of the world, negotiated their own identity, negotiated belonging to a people, a people that God loves so much that God desires to be like Him. "

The Pope then referred to the 20th century novel, "Master of the World" that focuses on "the spirit of worldliness that leads to apostasy". Today it is thought that "we have to be like everyone else, we have to be more normal, like everyone else, with this adolescent progressivism." And then "what follows is history": "the death sentences, human sacrifices". "But you think that today there are no human sacrifice s? There are many, many! And there are laws that protect them."

"But what consoles us faced with the progress of this worldly spirit, the prince of this world, the path of infidelity, is that the Lord is always here, that he can not deny Himself, the Faithful One: He is always waiting for us, He loves us so much and He forgives us when we repent for a few steps, for some small steps in this spirit of worldliness, we go to him, the faithful God. With the spirit of the Church's children, we pray to the Lord for His goodness, His faithfulness to save us from this worldly spirit that negotiates all, to protect us and let us move forward, as his people did through the desert, leading them by the hand like a father leads his child. The hand of the Lord is a sure guide".
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God exists : God does not exist

This is for YOU. . .You know who you are!

A case of contradictories which are true.  God exists : God does not exist.  Where is the problem?  I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure that my love is not illusory.  I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word.  But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion. (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge, 114.)

Note the near perfect Thomistic distinction. . .
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17 November 2013

Who will I be. . .at the end?

33rd Sunday OT
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Our Lady of the Rosary, NOLA

The Man and The Boy—father and son—walk through an unnamed country laid waste by greed, hubris, and stupidity. There is nothing now but bitter ash, steel-gray bones, and cold human savagery. When the apocalypse arrived, it arrived with a whisper—no warning: no time to think, to pray, to remember. Those who survive do not gives thanks to luck or God; they do not count themselves among the fittest or the privileged. They are damned to live, damned to living on so little that it could be nothing with the next step, the next breath. The Man and The Boy have fire. And they carry this fire toward somewhere That Way. Anywhere but Here. Since God did not show His face nor did He send His angels to rebuke the stupidity of Man, The Man and The Boy walk. That's their prayer, their itinerant liturgy of starvation and unrelenting fear. What the world is for them now is nothing. There is nothing now but the world abandoned, left to rot as it turns around a star no one will ever see rise again. Jesus warns: “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” Who will you be when everything is thrown down?

That question—who will you be when everything is thrown down?—is the question our apocalyptic literature asks us to ponder. From the Book of Daniel to the Book of Revelation, from The War of the Worlds to World War Z and The Walking Dead, we are confronted again and again with the possibility that everything we know and love will come to an abrupt, explosive end, and we will be left with nothing. In Cormac McCarthy's world-ending novel, The Road, a man and his son walk toward an undefined, undisclosed Somewhere. Mid-way through their pilgrimage, McCarthy gives us a vision: “[The Man] walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” What is the absolute truth of the world? Cold, unrelenting, darkness. And who are we? Hunted animals living on borrowed time. Believe it or not, this post-apocalyptic nightmare is for some among us a dream come true, and serves not only as a vision of things to come but as a philosophy as well, a settled-upon way of thinking about life.

That some of us would celebrate “the crushing black vacuum of the universe” and prefer to see themselves as “hunted animals trembling. . .in their cover” shouldn't surprise us. Given fallen human nature and the excuse of There Is No God So All Is Permitted, why not think of creation as a random cosmic process and humanity as prey-animals. Helmut Thielicke calls this attitude nihilism, writing, “Nihilism literally has only one truth to declare, namely, that ultimately Nothingness prevails and the world is meaningless.” Our own cultural turn to nihilism is attributed to the 19th c. German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose anti-Christ prophet, Zarathustra proclaimed the death of God. Nietzsche wrote, “Nihilism is. . .not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.” Contemporary nihilists continue the tradition. Nothing is true. Nothing is good or beautiful. Nothing matters. There is no point. No hope. No faith. Just destroy it all, release nothingness from its confining order, and let chaos reign.
 
Who will you be when everything is thrown down? Apocalypse fascinates western man b/c he wants to know who he is w/o the confining order of law, family, moral obligation, or God. Who am I really in the absence of tradition, science, the transcendent? If McCarthy's novel can be taken as a partial answer, Western Man is a violent serial rapist just one missed-meal away from becoming a cannibal. Jesus too gives us a glimpse of who we might become. He tells us that we will be “seized and persecuted,” handed over by family members and friends. At the end—the end of everything—even those who love us will abandon us. “You will be hated by all because of my name. . .” Is this a reason to despair? No, “not a hair on your head will be destroyed,” he promises. And yet, even this reassurance may seem shallow in light of the destruction of everything we know and love. So, to put The End in the proper perspective, we have to broaden our view to include the whole of salvation history, the entire prophetic tradition from God's first Word spoken over the nothingness of the void all the way to the last flickering images of Revelation in the mind of St John. What do we see? The long promise of God: be with Me, persevere with Me, and I will not abandon you. 
 
This is the promise that tells us who and what we are right up to The End. We are the recipients of a Divine Promise, a promise that constitutes the foundation of our lives in faith and shapes our lives with the hope of the resurrection. In this hope, that we will go on in the presence of God, nothing here and now, not even the destruction of the world, means the end of who and what we are in Christ. Because who and what we are is Children of the Most High, the redeemed sons and daughters of the Creator. Reaching back from this promise is the Hand of God, anointing those who believe with the blood of the Son and endowing them with more than just existential meaning, more than just a temporal purpose: we are anointed prophets, priests, and kings in the name of Christ and nothing can remove from us the ministry and mission we have received from Him Who made us. If an apocalypse sets fire to the whole world, nothing for us changes. We are still charged with proclaiming the freely offered mercy of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Jesus promises us, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” 
 
Who will we be when everything is thrown down; when not one stone is left standing on another? With steadfast faith and iron perseverance, we will be who we are made and saved to be: Christs for one another. The temptation to give our praise and thanksgiving to Nothingness, to yield our hearts and minds to the numbing background noise of nihilism—it's constant: yield to the illusion that you are nothing more than thinking animals! Accept that you are accidents of chemistry and radiation! Live like commodities in a stockyard—eating, breeding, dying like cattle. For those who worship Nothing, nothing is sacred; nothing is good, true, beautiful. Yet we know that He Who made us and saves us shows Himself to us through everything He has made. So, even The End—when it comes—will reveal the glory of God. The Good News is that the end is not The End for those who fear His name. “There will arise the sun of justice with its healing rays” for those live in awe of His power, His unyielding love. When everything is bitter ash and steel-gray bones, the Son will shine and those who look to him will see. We will see the coming of his kingdom; his coming to rule with justice.
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