Thursday
The Zen of Lisieux
Two passages from John C. h. Wu's The Golden Age of Zen that I ran across last
week:
"Tao is nothing else than the ordinary mind, every ordinary action is an
expression of Tao."
"[O]ne of the central insights of
Topic
Religion
A collection of 879 issues
Wendell
Great Quote
So I took that Wendell Berry book off my shelf earlier this week and read a few
pages. On the third page, I ran across this great passage: "What I'm arguing
against here is not complexity or mystery but dualism. I would like to purge
Wednesday
I stated earlier that I like Zen because it represents the highest attainment of
un-assisted philosophy. It dawned on me later that I should probably explain
myself.
What I mean by this is, Zen has sought the highest truths through naked thinking
and meditation, without the assistance afforded by
Zen Stuff
Who are the most Zen-like Christian thinkers? St. John of the Cross seems to be
the one that's mentioned the most, with Meister Eckhart a close second. I've
also seen at least two references to parallels with the thought of Blessed John
Ruysbroeck. Van Balthasar
Humorous and Frustrating
H.I.F.
So if I'm reading this story
[http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/we-re-catholic-priests-who-want-to-marry-1.1598866#.Um_XJFMQNFs]
correctly, this African priests starts dorfing a woman on Fridays, then decides
he wants to marry her.
Friday
Great Merton anecdote: "Over Labor Day [in 1938, the year before he was received
into the Catholic Church], Merton and Joe Roberts went to Philadelphia, arguing
over mysticism and the Catholic Church, drinking so much that it took several
days to recover." Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas
Catholic Lane
My latest over at Catholic Lane: On Charity
[http://catholiclane.com/on-charity/]. It's not my favorite piece: It's pretty
compact without much flair (no cogent quotes and clever anecdotes), and I'm
concerned that the piece slightly conflates "charity" with "entitlements,
9/11 Days
From the General Instruction of the Roman Missal
[http://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/the-mass/general-instruction-of-the-roman-missal/girm-chapter-2.cfm]
:
> D) The Concluding Rites
> 90.To the Concluding Rites belong the following:
> a) brief announcements, should they be necessary;
>
CPV
The Catholic Point of View
"Everyone has opinions . . . but not everyone has a point of view." Joseph
Epstein, "H.L. Mencken for Grownups," Partial Payments.
Epstein's remark is critical, citing V.S. Naipul's condescending remark about
one of his characters, "she
On Deliberate Barbarism
We need myths. They're irrational signposts in our strange spiritual land: they
guide us even when we don't know we're being guided. We don't even necessarily
understand them, but only a shallow rationalism (a "defecated rationality" is
how Russell Kirk