Empires rarely learn in time because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection.
– Robert Jensen (School of Journalism, University of Texas), “The Imperial Delusions of the United States,” Al Jazeera
The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness…It has created a subjective consciousness concerned only with self-satisfaction…It has so enthroned the present that a promised future, delayed but certain, is unthinkable.
– Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination
In the busy, teeming crowd, which as community is both too much and too little, man becomes weary of society, but the cure is not in making the discovery that God’s thought was incorrect. No, the cure is precisely to learn all over again the most important thing, to understand oneself in one’s longing for community.
– Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
I am writing this on Søren Kierkegaard’s feast day in the calendar of the Episcopal Church. He died childless, having written in the language of an obscure little country. He could’ve written in German, but he wrote in Danish. He chose to write locally, for the people he both loathed and loved. His neighbors drove him crazy, for their provincial views and their lack of appreciation of truly real, reflective life. But they were also his neighbors, his kin, and he wanted to write for their confusion and edification. Read more
