Peter Edman
Bob Buford has sent out a passage from John Henry Newman’s sermons as recommended summer reading for his e-mail list. I thought it worth sharing with those of you who might not be on that list.
This is Newman’s Sermon 30, preached on the Feast of St. Luke, ”The Danger of Accomplishments,” from his Parochial & Plain Sermons (1908). As a literature person, I take exception to a good part of the sermon—he falls prey to false dichotomies—but its overall point is well taken.
Now the danger of an elegant and polite education is, that it separates feeling and acting; it teaches us to think, speak, and be affected aright, without forcing us to practise what is right. . . .
And here I must notice something besides in elegant accomplishments, which goes to make us over-refined and fastidious, and falsely delicate. In books, everything is made beautiful in its way. Pictures are drawn of complete virtue; little is said about failures, and little or nothing of the drudgery of ordinary, everyday obedience, which is neither poetical nor interesting. True faith teaches us to do numberless disagreeable things for Christ’s sake, to bear petty annoyances, which we find written down in no book. In most books Christian conduct is made grand, elevated, and splendid; so that any one, who only knows of true religion from books, and not from actual endeavours to be religious, is sure to be offended at religion when he actually comes upon it, from the roughness and humbleness of his duties, and his necessary deficiencies in doing them. It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples’ feet; but the sands of the real desert have no lustre in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation.
Buford himself has a new book out this summer, Finishing Well.
Gleanings, Character and Ethics, Leadership, Tue 12 Jul 2005
It is possible to learn all about the mysteries of the Bible and never be affected by it in one's soul. Great knowledge is not enough.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
Israel-Lebanon: A Clash of Cultures
America’s Most Important Export
Christian Realism and the United Nations
Prayers for People under Pressure by Jonathan Aitken.
A practical spiritual handbook.
Christopher Nolan’s Achievement: The Dark Knight: “The title of the Nolan’s latest Batman film calls to mind medieval chivalry in a postmodern key. The dark knight embraces extraordinary tasks and fights against enormous odds; his quest is to restore what has been corrupted and to recover what has been lost. In so doing, he takes upon himself a suffering and loneliness that isolate him from his fellow citizens and inevitably court their misunderstanding and scorn. He is a dark knight, in part, because the world he inhabits is nearly void of hope and virtue, and, in part, because some of the darkness resides within him, in his internal conflicts between the good he aspires to restore and the means he deploys to fend off evil. Of the many filmmakers designing dark tales of quests for redemption, Christopher Nolan is currently making a serious claim to being the master craftsman.” (Thomas S. Hibbs, First Things: On the Square • 2008 07 22)
Unplanned Parenthood: “Hall offers a faithful reconception of parenthood that resists notions of the “progressive family” and instead summons the church to lovingly and actively incorporate all children. She uses the doctrines of Creation, salvation, and eschatology—namely, that all children bear the image of God, that adoption is God’s form of salvation, and that God secures the future of the church—to move the church beyond mere biology and more deeply into its baptismal identity.” (Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom reviewing Conceiving Parenthood by Amy Laura Hall, Christianity Today • 2008 07 21)
What makes a supervillain?: “We’ve exposed all the stories we know as a culture to several peanut-butter-thick layers of ironic reimagining by now, parodying and re-parodying them until there’s nothing left to appreciate with any sincerity, but rather with a smirk and a knowing grin. So how, I wonder, does this culture manufacture more sincerity? How do we create something new that isn’t a parody of something we saw as kids?” (Brian Tiemann, Peeve Farm, on Joss Whedon’s excellent Internet-based musical, Dr. Horrible. • 2008 07 19)
Pope’s Speech at Barangaroo: “Dear friends, life is not governed by chance; it is not random. Your very existence has been willed by God, blessed and given a purpose (cf. Gen 1:28)! Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this - in truth, in goodness, and in beauty - that we find happiness and joy. Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth.” (Pope Benedict XVI, The Catholic Herald • 2008 07 17)
• Hollywood’s Hero Deficit (2008 07 17)
• The Return of Religion (2008 07 16)
• Food for Thought (2008 07 15)
• Sir John Templeton: iconic innovator in finance and religion (2008 07 12)
• Running on Faith (2008 07 11)
Not Just Science: Questions Where Christian Faith and Natural Science Intersect by E. David Cook.
A look at the questions students should be asking as they study the natural sciences in relation to the Christian worldview and think critically about God's creation.
