Egregious Reader

From his 1962 collection of sermons : WE should prefer perhaps to be under no yoke of any sort and to have done with burdens altogether. We should prefer to live entirely untrammelled lives, and to do our thinking apart from all restraints. Why should man, who is lord of all the creatures, not be lord also of his own life? Why should he subject himself to any discipline at all, whether in thought or in action? Jean Jacques Rousseau began a famous treatise with the sentence, 'Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains'; and his advice to us was that we should rid our-selves without delay of every yoke and chain that had ever been forged, including of course the yoke and chain of Christ. ... No man was ever more proud than was Rousseau of having won complete freedom for himself, but what one feels as one reads his Confessions is that with every chapter he is forging another link in the chain that ultimately strangled his intelligence no less than it had already strangled...

Alan Lomax (the principal recorder of what would have been lost music ... blues, bluegrass, etc.) worked for the library of congress. Toward the end of his life he said: "When the whole world is bored with automated, mass, distributed, video music, our descendants will despise us for having thrown away the best of our culture."  Once you lose your past you lose yourself.

“philological clarity in literary texts can quickly turn into too much of a good thing. Literature in general, and the narrative prose of the Hebrew Bible in particular, cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audiences guessing about motives and connections, and, above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in endless interplay that resist neat resolution. In polar contrast, the impulse of the philologist is—here a barbarous term nicely catches the tenor of the activity—“to disambiguate” the terms of the text. The general result when applied to translation is to reduce, simplify, and denature the Bible. These unfortunate consequences are all the more pronounced when the philologist, however acutely trained in that discipline, has an underdeveloped sense of literary diction, rhythm, and the uses of figurative language; and that, alas, is often the case in an era in which literary culture is not widely disseminated ev...

Luke 18:1 And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint "St. Luke tells us that the moral of this parable is that men ought always to pray and not to faint. The word faint will, however, come to many people today as a surprise. We are so apt to interpret the meaning of prayer as if Jesus had said that men ought always to pray and not to work. That, I believe, is precisely the mistake that most of us make in our thinking about prayer: we think of it as an alternative to effort. We often speak as if there were two contrasted ways of facing the evils of our mortal lot—we may either fold our hands and pray about them, or we may pull ourselves together and do what we can to mend them. But it is quite plain that our Lord's way of looking at prayer is as different from this as the day is from the night. What He said was that men ought always to pray and not to faintor, as the modern versions have it, not to lose heart. That is to s...

I really enjoyed this book. I was a pastor for about five years, with significant journey there and then a pretty painful letting go of the job. I was not the lead pastor, but I really did resonate with a lot of her journey, both into and out of church work. For example, one of her concluding statements that resonate with my own experience: "On the twentieth anniversary of my ordination, I would have to say that at least one of the things that almost killed me was becoming a professional holy person. I am not sure that the deadliness was in the job as much as it was in the way I did it ... As many years as I wanted to wear a clerical collar and as hard as I worked to get one, taking it off turned out to be as necessary for my salvation as putting it on. " I like the way she says that ... whether the job was dangerous or the way she went about it. I agree. Probably a good measure of both. Here is another moment - she is describing lessons that came with losing the pow...

Life is weird; long and brutal; short and bright, vanity and delight, meaningless, aimless, wandering and purposeful, deliberate, designed. Every simple thing is infinite mystery, never plumbed. A bird flaps overhead as I fly 70 mph heading north on 85. Combustable, earthen liquid firing my tires as I gas, the power of friction, the power of touch as I touch my breaks or gas. Driving in a machine built by machines built by men built by God. And above, lighter than my arm, I see this tiny, living intricacy flapping fins in the sea-sky oven-baked in the orange morning light. And this we call a common thing, a common moment. But it isn't! There is nothing common here. Nothing. Maybe that is some key to living, to shake a mental fist at the very thought that anything in this life is common. As light from outer space freckles a green hill diffused through a million leaves of a hundred trees. The green hill-cloth is living and unstoppable, breaking brown flesh the world over. And...