miniZibaldone

(Paul Klee.  At the Core , 1935) Experience itself, in its totality, shows the way to an authentic understanding of the term reason or rationality. Indeed, reason is that singular event of nature in which it – reason – reveals itself as the operative need to explain reality in all of its factors so that we are introduced to the truth about things. In this way, reality emerges within experience and  rationality illuminates the factors within it. To say “rational” is to affirm the transparency or intelligibility of human experience, its substance and depth. Rationality is critical transparency of our human experience: “critical” means according to an all-encompassing view. (Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense , p. 101 )

A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching by  Stanley Hauerwas We live in a death-denying world that seems determined to develop technologies that will enable us to get out of life alive. Yet the more we strive to be free of death the more our lives are shaped by the death-determined means we create to try to free ourselves of death. Even more paradoxical, the means we use to free ourselves from death only serve to increase our isolation from one another. We fear the loneliness we think death entails, but it turns out that the loneliness we fear death entails is the expression of the loneliness made unavoidable by our attempts to avoid death. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. But Lazarus is still to die. We are still to die. Jesus, by contrast, has been raised never again to die. His death makes possible a communion that overwhelms the loneliness our sin creates. ... That feast we call Eucharist, for in eating it we are made “living member...

Being Disciples by Rowan Williams [T]here is no contrast, no tension really, between holiness and involvement in the world. On the contrary, the most holy, who is Jesus, is the most involved, most at the heart of human experience. And we really misunderstand the whole thing very seriously if we think that holiness means being defended from our own humanity or other people’s humanity: quite the opposite. To understand this, we need to bear in mind an all-important distinction between being holy and simply being good. There’s a fine phrase in one of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, when a character is described by another: ‘She was saintly, but she wasn’t a saint.’ The character in question is indeed saintly, very strict, devout and intense, but the effect she has on those around her is to make them feel guilty, frustrated and unhappy. They feel inadequate, and I suspect that many of us experience this when we encounter people we think are saintly or Very Good—they make us feel rather worse ... In...