love, grace, fellowship as Trinitarian
We do not have purity from ourselves but are upraised to it.
We know of no love incapable of wrath.
Acts makes clear that the household/family itself is important to the Church.
distinctions and the Trinity:
-- Sabellian
-- -- 1. purely conceptual
-- -- 2. founded conceputal
-- -- 3. modal
-- orthodox
-- -- 4. relative
-- tritheistic
-- -- 5. compositive
-- -- 6. count
categorical vs hypothetical prayer
-- hypothetical includes impetratory, categorical includes adoration
Ps 88:21-22 as a template for canonization of saints (cp. Inveni David)
"The totus christus is christus victor." Barth CD IV/3.1
All of the kinds of cause are implicit in the final cause.
Maimonides' gracious ruse interpretation of sacrificial ritual
an emptiness is blowing like a wind across the plain;
the sorrows fall in torrents in a never-ceasing rain
"In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction." CS Lewis
Arrogance is blind to simple wisdoms.
Gersonides: separate immaterial intelligences as the law, order, and rectitude (equilibrium) of phenomena
"No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity." Seneca
"Two most beautiful things will follow us wherever we go, universal Nature and our own virtue....All that is of the greatest worth for a man lies outside the power of his fellow men, and can neither be given nor taken away."
"Once virtue has hardened the mind, it renders you invulnerable from every quarter."
A human emotion is as it were on its way to rational thought.
We do not merely eat food; we make of it a meal, and meal-making is social by its nature -- shared recipes, shared techniques, shared cuisine and style. To make a sandwich or a tempura or a curry is to make it with a host of others, participating in something shared.
God, loving us, gives us grace that we might have fellowship with Him.
the major repulsive characterizations: self-absorption, dishonestly, desperation, pushy cheerfulness
Legal bans are always and only bans to the limit of feasibility.
Spinoza is closer to right when one recognizes that substance is related to accident and mode as final cause; the problem, of course, being that Spinoza denies final causes.
final cause
-- of action
-- of form
-- of existence
-- -- as subject of inherence
-- -- as external source of being
Helen vs. Penelope
All saints recapitulate their ancestral Christ.
Liberty cannot be distinguished from usurpation except with respect to common good.
as-it-were-filial piety toward the natural
Wealth requires the building of material traditions (although individual wealth is sometimes, even often, derived from cannibalizing material traditions already built).
the accumulation of deteriorations
Equality is sometimes used as a hostage-shield for undermining support networks that solve genuine problems, while pretending that no alternative solutions need to be provided.
Much of our sense of Northern and Celtic myth is derived from Christians preserving Northern and Celtic myths.
"Divine grace, predestined in Christ to be given to the whole world, is secretly at work in the whole sphere of history, and thus all myths, philosophies, and poetic creations are innately capable of housing within themselves an intimation of divine glory." Balthasar
Professional codes of ethics must be interpreted not as restrictions of rights but as protections of them.
the warning passages in Hebrews: 2:1-4; 3:7-4:13; 5:11-6:12; 10:19-39; 12:14-29
the end-use problem in education
negation as failure and 'not-necessarily-p implies not-p'
distributive vs collective pantheism
the arm of God in the Magnificat as the Son of God (Rosmini)
Professional ethics are developed individually and refined cooperatively.
"Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action." Steinbeck
"...a great many people are capable of returning to virtue's path if punishment is waived." Seneca
Homeschooling is the natural matrix of all schooling.
When bishops do not do what is required to purify the Church from within, it always happens that the Church is purified by its enemies from without.
Scripture in text, Scripture in proclamation, Scripture in prayer, Scripture in Church doctrine, Scripture in Church practice
All successful human cooperation, however complex, gets its success from the success of component cooperations constituted by two or three people.
the hyper-LARPing character of almost everything in modern society -- politics, art, religion, science
professional ethics and the demonstrative regress (the ends of the profession qua service serving as a check and means of refinement)
Narrative is the natural language for experimentation -- think of a Faraday memoir. This is suppressed by the Methods format of modern papers, but even there it is not wholly eliminated. Every experiment has a plot, every experiment has a theme, every experiment has characters (the experimenters, the participants, the equipment). Every experiment needs to work narratively as well as abstractly, and it is by thinking through the logic of the narrative that you uncover biases. The convention of this particular 'genre' abhors the deus ex machina.
philosophical field / attention space / system of networks of alliances and oppositions
Politics is a realm of approximations.
"The provisionality of myth must allow itself to be judged by the finality of the Gospel, so taht in this finality the world of myth may attain to its rightful rank and expressive value." Balthasar
natural theology of myth
-- 1. myth as evidence of human tendencies
-- 2. myth as a moral language
-- 3. myth as expression of virtue of religio
revealed theology of myth
-- 1. preparatio evangelica
-- 2. spoiling due to original sin
-- 3. mythmaking as subcreation
-- 4. True Myth
sources of natural religious practice: vow, symbol, experiential association, which together create precedents, which are then mythologized
the light of the Two Trees in Tolkien a depiction of the light of art undivorced from reason
amicable populations vs. political alliances
ethnic vs national uses of flags
Human rights should be upheld, but human rights discourse in partisan politics should be regarded with suspicion, because it is used as a Powerful Justifier, and Powerful Justifiers in partisan politics always need to be regarded cautiously.
As means to the ends of civil society, states have primary (easing and protecting citizen life by preventing interference and impediment), secondary (serving as a forum for negotiation and adjudication), and fallback (stepping in when nothing else can work) functions; state decadence consists in the inversion of the order of these functions, so that fallback functions begin to be treated as primary and primary functions as a sort of safety net for state action rather than civil ends.
the ism vs the istic
If it's an existential crisis, you won't be able to solve it by means of a political party.
"Being as such by itself to the very end 'causes wonder,' behaving as something to be wondered at, something strikign and worthy of wonder." Balthasar
language as kenosis of logos
Levi-Strauss on Father Christmas
Intuitions are not private languages but communicable.
The horror of evil arises from desecration.
the novel as a response to the collapse of the epic
-- this suggests naturally that kinds divide into a few groups
-- -- 1. reclamation: try to find new ways to reclaim epic qualities
-- -- 2. stabilization: try to find a new equilibrium with similar functions to those of epic
-- -- 3. acceleration: try to eliminate epic qualities entirely and replace them with the anti-epic
subcreative fall (art used for domination)
heroisms of the truth, of the good, of the beautiful
conscientious objection & avoiding the profanation of the Image of God
Observation discloses not merely the transient but also the invariant or (relatively) permanent; it implies of suggests something beyond the immediately observed, so that by quite ordinary logical links one observed fact, properly understood, implies other observable facts, and suggests yet other observable facts.
Logic is an instrument of explication.
We can make the same moral claims while expressing different moral sentiments.
To have a meaning is to be a means to a communicative end.
heart-warming as an aesthetic concept
There is a significant, although not absolute, difference between the secure and the insecure working class.
Acts 9: Saul in persecuting the Church persecuted Jesus; this anticipates and grounds the Pauline doctrine of the Church as the Body of Christ.
the joy so deep it is almost like sorrow
Luthien, Melian, and Galadriel are all more important and more powerful than their husbands.
Most critical theory that one finds in actual application is elitist in motive and in structure, and is received by academics precisely because it gives them permission to regard with contempt, with dismissal, or with scoffing the masses in their uncritical ignorance.
Societies most often deteriorate through common failings.
"Undoubtedly, the passions need reason. Without it, some would not survive; others cannot be aroused and stimulated sufficiently to produce feelings of wonder." Rosmini
