Willingness to help others only scales to the extent personal relationships do.
unconditional vs. conditional esperability
Possibilities are expressions of actualities.
Hopes presuppose required actions.
Hopes in the thick of things act, but hopes at leisure also seek reasons and evidences.
We can literally see that some things are possible.
Every actuality implies multiple possibilities. When we delve into the actuality of something, we always discover multiple possibilities. When we test whether something is actual, we presuppose its having multiple possibilities available to it, based on context.
Possible worlds must not only be internally consistent but externally consistent with other possible worlds beign possible in the same manifold; or, to put it in other terms, must share the same general kind of possibility.
causal possibilities
causal possibilities with respect to containing boundaries: spatial possibilities
causal possibilities with respect to clocking changes: temporal possibilities
causal possibilities relative to a given container: places
causal possibilties relative to a given clock: times
causal possibilities with respect to contexts of means and resources: possibilities of action-range
causal possibilities relative to a given means-resource context: feasibilities
causal possibilities with respect to laws: deontic possibilities
causal possibilities with respect to given laws: permissibilities
Justice requires reparation and restoration when wrongful behavior done with faulty disposition results in harmful consequences, and reparation and restoration is practically possible. What it requires in other cases is more complex.
Tort laws and delict laws are like fences around the rule of law.
separation of powers within the legislative (bicameral), the executive (plural executive), and the judicial (forms of court, like equity and law)
Apostolic succession contrasts with private revelation and secret tradition; it is publicly verifiable tradition.
'the apostolate of the ear' (Francis)
-- welcome, 'accompany', discern, integrate
-- first four Spiritual Works of Mercy
Annunciation: purification :: Pentecost : illumination :: Assumption : perfection
purifying purifying: Immaculate Conception
illuminating purifying: Annunciation
perfecting purifying: Nativity of Christ
purifying illuminating: Co-passion
illuminating illuminating: Resurrection of Christ
perfecting illuminating: Pentecost
purifying perfecting: Dormition
illuminating perfecting: Assumption
perfecting perfecting: Coronation
Acts presents the Church as the culmination of both the Hebraic and the Hellenistic strands of Judaism.
Romanticized versions of things lose their value for certain functions, but it is an error to think that romanticizing things has no value.
Even criminals often form quasi-civil institutions.
"Human nature's goodness is like water's downwardness." Mencius
"That which is done without doing is world-order; that which arrives without sending is destiny."
"An obedient son and respectful brother, but likes defying superiors: rare. One who doesn't like defying superiors but likes raising rebellion: never." Analects 1.2
"Study, then appropriately practice it -- is it not pleasant? Have friends come from afar -- is it not happiness? Not understood but not angered -- it is not noble?" Analects 1.1
amicableness, responsibleness, politeness, perceptiveness, trustworthiness
In the house, better amicable than responsible; in the forum better responsible than amicable; in all things the best is to have both.
Restraint of self and restoration of social order makes for amicableness.
If one just desires amicableness, it is at hand.
Glib tongue and polished presentation are rarely amicable.
"The three hundred verses are summarized in one phrase: guiltless mind." Analects 2.2
One maintains social order by inquiring about social order.
The amicable find comfort in being amicable.
Restraining oneself and maintaining courtesy is being amicable.
Glib tongue disrupts authority; impatience in the small disrupts great plans.
The man of highest authority does not make his authority obvious. That is how he maintains authority. The man of inferior authority cannot rid it of the appearance of authority. Thus he has no authority.
Doing well creates things; authority preserves them.
Authority is the beneficence of doing well; everyone relies on authority. Authority is the dwelling place of doing well.
When doing well is lost, next comes authority; when authority is lost, next is being amicable; when being amicable is lost, next is being responsible; when being responsible is lost, next is courtesy.
Universalists often transfer passages concerned with the catholicity of the mission of the Church to universality of heavenly destination.
There can be no Seal of the Prophets because prophecy is inexhaustible.
"My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner." Augustine
The fundamental problem of Gnosticism is that no number of emanations could actually model the richness of the true spiritual life; such things will always fall short of the inexhaustible glory of God and the grace He gives us. The apparatus of emanations was doomed to be false gnosis from the beginning.
Nothing is a success or failure except in light of alternative possibilities.
Moral, jural, and sacral matters consist of unities of 'relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact'.
No society can properly be free that does not recognize a moral order higher than itself.
"The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny....The only constitutional tax is the tax which ministers to public necessity." Coolidge
"Wisdom is a communicative and philanthropic thing." Clement of Alexandria
"He is a king who governs according to laws and has the skill to sway willing subjects."
"Generalship involves three ideas: caution, boldness, and the union of the two."
In offensive action, caution is the material organized formally by boldness; in defensive action, boldness is the material organized formally by caution.
Mitzvot require intention because the point of a mitzvah is to live according to Torah, not to stand on its own.
The Church is by its nature a partly linguistic structure.
God began evangelization of the world with the Law.
Kerygma begins with a call to repentance.
There are many different communal experiences in the Church, joining together into an ecclesial river of experiences characterized by a collective intentionality that does not exclude but even incorporates and reinterprets many individual intentionalities. But unlike many other such communities, there is a community-subject, an owner of the whole ecclesial river of expereinces, distinct from, but also in some sense owning, the moral personality constituted by the collective intentionality; the moral personality proceeds from the indvidual members and the community-subject jointly, constituting it as a sovereign sphere of power and a juridical subject of rights. It is this joint constitution that makes the Church both a holy hierarchy and a liturgical commonwealth.
the vestment of titles of the Bride of Christ
Liturgy proper occurs in an outside-the-everyday state, marked with signs of spatial and temporal demarcation.
semiotic quasi-transcendence in reading, liturgy, movie-watching, etc.
-- the signs are technically still there, but they also seem to fall away, as if you were beyond them, among the things they signify.
