Dostoevsky said, “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”
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
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.
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
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
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
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
View from the Lanai
Precarity
Precarity means something that can be given and taken away, and for such a long time I thought that precarity must inherently be a bad thing or at least not a very Christian thing to feel that way when I know I felt delicate and I thought well surely I just have to get back to that place before where I felt durable. And then I read a wonderful comparison of the work of Dorothy Day, catholic reformer, and compared with Reinhold Niebuhr, the amazing Protestant, theologian, and both of their account of the word precarity. Dorothy Day used it to describe the state in which we live as people of faith aware in the world, and yet delicate, and Reinhold Niebuhr described precarity as a way of describing the delicacy of our world, but hoping that we just need to plow through with faithfulness and reasonable good conscience and I was like no, I think I’m on the Dorothy side.
Kate Bowler (interview with Russell Moore)
I think that when we’re really honest most of the things that we build our lives are things that can come apart in any moment, and once we know that, and can maybe live inside that with a little more honesty, we might begin to start to say different spiritual things than we did before .