Category: Notes Anthology

If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

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Overthinking

Somewhere between overthinking and underthinking is responsible and responsive thinking. As a Christian who tries to be a thinking Christian I’ve always taken seriously the discipleship of the intellect, the Christian mind, or as Anselm called it “faith seeking understanding.”

Jim Gordon

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Contemplation

It is impossible to shift priorities if we are in a constant, busy, frenetic lifestyle. There has to be that pause, that breath, that waiting, that willingness to be still until we know. Be still and know—but the stillness doesn’t immediately lead to knowing. At first, we have to be still, and then we have to be patient until the knowing comes about.

Barbara Holmes 

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Doubt

I’m not describing atheists, apostates, or “exvangelicals” here. This is how many ordinary Christians feel. Or at least, it’s the water they swim in, the intrusive thought in the back of the mind, the semi-conscious source of inertia they feel when the alarm blares on Sunday morning. American Christians face no Colosseum, but this emotional and intellectual pressure is very real. The doubts add up.

It doesn’t help that doubt is in vogue. Doubt is sexy, and not only in the wider culture. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been told by a pastor or Christian professor that doubt is a sign of spiritual maturity. That faith without doubt is superficial, a mere honeymoon period. That doubt is the flip side of faith, a kind of friend to fidelity. That the presence of doubt is a sign of a healthy theological mind, and its absence—well, you can fill in the rest.

The pro-doubt crowd gets two important things entirely right. First, they want space to ask honest questions. Second, they want to remove the stigma of doubt.

Brad East

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Human Behavior

“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

Viktor Frankl

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True Professional

Edward Said has called the true intellectua: one who pursues their craft not as a profession, working 9-5, but rather for the love of the thing itself.  

A language

“You need a language with which to express things, which at a certain age you felt you could do yourself, and gradually, somehow, it’s like switching from pastel paint to heavy oils.”

Peter Brown

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born to be happy

Solzhenitsyn observed, if “man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die.” And as he pointed out, if such a credo holds, “for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good?” 

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Survivors

Only those who have tried to breathe under water know how important breathing really is, and will never take it for granted again. They are the ones who do not take shipwreck or drowning lightly. They’re the ones who can name “healing” correctly, the ones who know what they have been saved from, and the only ones who develop the patience and humility to ask the right questions of God and of themselves.

Only the survivors know the full terror of the passage, the arms that held them through it all, and the power of the obstacles that were overcome. All they can do is thank God they made it through! For the rest of us it is mere speculation, salvation theories, and “theology.”

Richard Rohr

Believing in God

“To me it comes down to this question: do I choose to believe in a universe that is self created, whose laws are self created, where life is ordered out of nothing, or do I choose to believe in a universe that is an expression of the power, beauty, and will of a God whose origins I cannot explain? Both require a measure of faith. I choose to believe that there is a God whose handiwork is seen in the cosmos, who created the laws that order our universe, and who brought forth life on our planet.”

“I believe in God because I believe God is the best explanation for the universe we live in. I believe in God because I’ve experienced what I believe is God’s presence and my life has been positively affected by my faith. I believe in God because I’m drawn to Jesus, and Jesus believed in God. But I also believe in God because I see the impact faith in God has had on the lives of so many people, and through them, on the world.”

Adam Hamilton

extremes

The far left will always end up in failure because they reject the reality of sin…the far right will fail because they believe they are without it…

Phoenix Preacher 

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Dostoevsky said, “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”

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We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping? 

A Zen K?an

The sound of two hands clapping is the sound of a person being elevated into a joyful state by art because they are reminded of their connection to all other people facing the same struggles. The sound of one hand clapping is the silence of suppressed joy and appreciation. It is the person who feels delight in another person but is unable to express that out of fear of embarrassment or some other repressed reason. The one hand is raised in desire to participate, now thwarted by a lack of courage. This reluctance to express one’s feelings to another human being is isolating—it is the deafening, unbearable sound of silence.

Kareem Abdul- Jabbar

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Technology and Religion

If the misuses and abuses of technology depend upon how people engineer, design, envision, imagine, and market culture, then simply introducing new technological tools will not lead to the realization of Christians’ deepest fears. Rather, those fears are only realized when Christians, themselves, are complicit participants in affecting the cultural life produced by the misuse and abuse of new technologies. Religious communities have long critiqued how new technologies fail to meet people’s expectations of their material and spiritual well-being. By taking those critiques seriously, perhaps there could be a more holistic, human solution to address the cultural issues behind the fears inaugurated by technological change.

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Good for Connecticut:

Connecticut will cancel roughly $650 million in medical debt for an estimated 250,000 residents this year, Gov. Ned Lamont announced Friday, saying it is the first state to provide this type of relief.

The effort will liberate many residents from “the cloud” over their heads and give them more freedom to buy a home, start a business or continue with their education, Lamont told CNN. That will help them strengthen their financial standing in a state with a large wealth gap.

“It’s a debt that you had no control over,” Lamont told CNN. “It’s not like you overspent. You get hit by a health care calamity.”

Residents whose medical debt equals 5% or more of their annual income or whose household income is up to 400% of the federal poverty line, or about $125,000 in 2024, are eligible.

Those who qualify do not need to apply – they will receive letters in the mail saying their debt has been eliminated as soon as this summer. More than 1 in 10 Connecticut residents have medical debt in collections.

via Scot McKnight

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Knowledge

True knowledge changes us. “If only I had known,” can also mean, “If only I had been a different person.” Knowledge, in this biblical sense, is much deeper than the collecting and management of facts. In biblical terms, we know by participation or communion. When Christ says of his detractors that they do not know God, he dismisses their mastery of the facts (“And these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor Me.” John 16:3) Those who accused Christ and urged the Romans to crucify Him, not only knew the facts of the Jewish faith – they were experts.

Fr Stephen Freeman

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God’s fire

Real fire is destructive; throw yourself into a fire and you will be destroyed.
God’s fire is destructive too because it can swiftly eliminate all self-illusions, grandiose ideas, ego-inflation, and self-centeredness. Throw yourself into the spiritual fire of divine love and everything you grasp for yourself will be destroyed until there is nothing left but the pure truth of yourself.

Scientist and theologian Ilia Delio

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The beauty of rising every morning…

…we all arise from bed each day with some pain—the pain of lost loved ones, the pain of lost dreams, the pain of aging out of relevance. Yet, we endure that daily pain because it is the worthwhile cost of the daily joys and delights we experience in loving, in dreaming, and in growing older among family and friends.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar 

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY