Tag: marilynne robinson
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“Oh, yes, rowdy old capitalism. Let it ply its music.”
Workers, a category that seems to subsume us all except the idlest rich, should learn what they need to learn to be competitive in the new economy. All the rest is waste and distraction. Competitive with whom? On what terms? To what end? With anyone who has done a clever thing we did not think…
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“…to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous.”
I feel it would be presumptuous of me to describe the ways of God. Those that are all we know of Him, when there is so much we don’t know. Though we are told to call him Father. And I know it would be presumptuous to speak as if the suffering that people feel as…
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“…humanity as a privilege.”
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that…
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“…sinners rather than saints…”
How does the Catholic vision differ from other traditions of Christianity? To answer that question would require a shelf of books. There are so many Christian traditions. But let me mention one aspect of Catholicism that affects the writer. All Christian denominations believe in original sin and humanity’s fallen nature, but Catholicism emphasizes the slow…
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“…modern image of science as the anti-theolgy…”
In the middle of the nineteenth century August Comte asserted with utmost confidence that science, by then, he said, essentially complete, had discredited and supplanted religion. A few years later, perhaps in part because of Comte had readied the way for the interpretation of it, Darwin’s theory of evolution was also widely understood to have…
David W. Swanson 