You can always find disagreement if you search for it.
We make-believe manyt hings, and some of them we confirm to be real, and some of them we make to be real.
To be baptized is to be covenantal; to be confirmed is to be prophetic; to be ordained is to be angelicized. But there are covenant breakers, false prophets, and fallen angels.
global moral anti-realisms
(1) morality is a model, useful for practical purposes, of nonmoral things
(2) morality is an expression of integrated attitudes toward nonmoral things
(3) morality is a false interpretation of nonmoral things
(4) morality is an imaginary system not grounded in nonmoral things
intellection as active truth
literacy as a fine art
To execute law faithfully requires the authority to assess, to incentivize, and to correct.
We do not merely experience things; we often experience what we have already experienced and/or anticipated experiencing.
To care is to build a discipline of care.
Justice is not scorched earth.
People get irritable at the sudden tearing down or sudden major revision of longstanding and widespread classifications, because we need such things as landmarks and common reference points.
'Information' is used to mean both distinguishability and the causes of distinguishability.
In political matters, it is necessary (1) to have at least a hazy idea of 'the way things should be' and (2) to connect this 'way things should be' to the way things are. This may be done by locating the 'way things should be' either in the past, in the future, or in an ideal realm. (Or any mix of the three. Also, it may vary across particular issues.)
Most oppression does not occur by way of property rights but by way of partisan networks.
In the Karaite understanding of revelation, God chose a book. In the Rabbinical understanding, God chose a nation.
Jude 12-13 is also quite clearly a reference to 1 Enoch, thus makign Jude 14 literally true. 1 Enoch 2:1 -- contrast with 'wandering stars'; 2:3 contrast with 'rainless clous'; 3:1, 5:1, contrast with 'autumn trees', 5:3 contrast with 'waves of sea'; compare Jude 15 with 5:4; compare Jude 6 with 1 Enoch 10:11-14; compare 'wandering stars with 18:12-13.
1 Enoch 61:10 as quasi-Trinitarian
Beliefs that are nourished endure; beliefs that are starved perish.
People who are especially tempted to doubt have a nasty habit of handling it by trying to impose doubt on everyone.
Luther's preface to Bibliander's translation of the Qur'an (1543) puts considerable emphasis on the eternality of the Church. (But note also that he argues that 'the Turks' have better customs than Rome.)
isopsephy = equicalculus
In common law jurisdictions, courts are laboratories for legal devices.
Poverty is often less a lack of money and more a cloud of chaos.
When raising children, people often make the mistake of pushing the means before they have determined the end.
In reconstructed proto-languages, even if we assume a perfect reconstruction, we could never guarantee that words were used in the same cnetury (we can only very roughly and comparatively make judgments about chronological length of etymological tree, and even then only sometimes) or in the same geographical area (due to extensive migration); linguistic models are built wolly on surviving linguistic data, which does not encode all aspects of the language. Nonetheless, a properly built reconstruction, albeit always with a bit of approximation and looseness, can still be quite good and, more to the point, a useful device, as we see with cases like Proto-Germannic, which is often roughly confirmed with new data and helps make plausible reconstructions of the meaning of newly discovered old inscriptions, some of which themselves occasionally get later confirmation.
Without attention to causal reasoning, theoretical physics always runs to wild speculation.
fictions inherent in the thing
fictions imposed by the mind on the thing
-- -- with a foundation in the thing
-- -- due to relation of the thing to other things
-- -- by arbitrary imposition
fictions constructed by the mind but not imposed on things
"Our desire to understand 'how nature works' (i.e., to find the M in X -> M -> Y) is perhaps even stronger than our desire to quantify it." Pearl
mediated divine presence
(1) by sign: (a) creation (b) theophany (c) vision
(2) by prophetic representation
(3) by sacrament
Authors never fully understand why their works appeal.
Changes in prices depend on the causal structures that underlie them.
the changing and changed world
the guessed-at world
the intersubjective medium
the world as witnessed and testified
All norms are associated with narratives that explain them.
soundness of question
--> NB a question can be unsound because it requires something to be true that is false, e.g,. "Why has there been no woman as prime minister of Canada?", showing a kind of inconsistency
The faith by which we are saved is a faith already in existence by the point at which we ourselves begin to be believe.
Mark 2:5 -- belief on behalf of another
scepter, throne, vestment, and matchless weapons
All enduring human greatness requires intensive habituations.
The world we experience is nto merely of moving things but of things with apparent possibilities of motion.
the Church as a foam of transformations
moral imago dei: humanity
jural imago dei: covenantal people
sacral imago dei: sacramental church
The tears of the Church have healing power.
The temptation with which Protestantism has struggled is to begin thinking that we are strong alone; but our strength is to be together in Christ. Where they have not forgotten, they have achieved greatly -- powerful preaching, glorious hymns -- but the siren always calls.
None of us are holy alone.
Romantic relationships build their internal narrative interest to those involved in them by building inequalities and equalizing them.
Toleration is always a policy, not a virtue, and everyone always in the end treats it as merely a policy.
Nothing is a 'deepity' in the correct sense unless it is an equivocation. (On this ground, we see that many claims that things are deepities are themselves deepities equivocating on the word 'deepity'.)
God creates non-God, and does not require any not-God to do it.
Baddorf & McKay's imitationist account of collective virtue ("A Theory of Collective Virtue"): "Collectives can possess virtues and vices; they can do so because they can possess reasonably broad and stable dispositions that functionally and intentionally imitate individual virtues and vices."
A just society is a society of just people acting justly.
good customs of decision-making // virtues (as good habits concerned with choosing)
Pearson & Mitroff's four stages of crisis management
(1) signal detection: identify warning signs and prepare for possible crisis
(2) probing and prevention: active search and reduction of risks
(3) damage containment
(4) recovery
(5) review & learning
survey, strategy, solution, study
People in argument are often not fully sincere, because they are improvising means to multiple ends. In argument people often commit to things in advance of their considered belief, and only to make their arguments work.
Augustine, Ep. 187 to Dardanus & the Church as Temple
X's right to Y vs. X's having Y being reasonable
pleasure and pain as motivation confirmations
business ethics as the ethics of juridical persons
-- as personated
-- as constituted
-- as socially participating
All methodology is based on stories of how results have been reached.
Investment, like proclamation, follows the parable of the sower.
the pope as custos urbis Dei
A recurring problem with trying to explain things in terms of make-believe (e.g., Walton) is that make-believe is an immensely sophisticated and complex cognitive activity, and thus poorly suited for explaining anything simpler.
representation, figuration, narrativization
Higher animals clearly experience the world in valenced terms; some such valenced experiences make more functional sense than others. We are able to assess and correct valence attributions accordingly.
Naturalizing projects have a fairly consistent track record of doing at best okay.
Church councils never get what they want but what they say.
Books are indirect meetings of persons.
Idolatry, murder, and adultery violate sacred bonds, and therefore when unrepented exceed what any finite punishment could 'fit'.
There seems reason to think that we make political alliances by deliberately stultifying ourselves to facilitate being on the same page with a large group of very different people.
States not kept on track always end up trying to govern what does not need to be governed and trying to avoid governing what very much needs it.
Malebranche is right that about all of our sensations have an ambiguity whereby we treat them as both mental and external to the mind; but he jumps too quickly to taking this to be an error.
"There is no other reason for saying that a square is not a circle than that the idea of a square is different from that of a circle and that the one can be thought of without thinking of the other." Malebranche (LO59)