Tag: Quote
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“…enlightenment rationality cannot make us happy…”
I think a lot of people know in their gut but have not yet thought it that enlightenment rationality is not adequate for a viable human society. It does many good things, like give us the capacity to fly an airplane or advance health care, but underneath that, enlightenment rationality cannot make us safe and…
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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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“…a recovery of personal, relational, revelational language…”
The language we are really fluent in, the language we are most used to, deals with impersonal data and functionalized roles. The practice of prayer, if it is going to amount to anything more than wish lists and complaints, requires a recovery of personal, relational, revelational language in both our listening and our speaking. -Eugene…
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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…
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Wendell Berry on Parenthood
But I have thought, too, that the term of human judgment is longer than parenthood, that the upbringing we give our children is not just for their childhood but for all their lives. And it is sure the duty of the older generation to be embarrassingly old-fashioned, for the claims of the “newness” of any…
David W. Swanson 