It is a good thing to find oneself in the care of a gifted physician. It is an oddly redemptive experience to know him also as one’s assailant.
This is the logic that is brought to bear by the Old Testament prophet Hosea, who finds promise in urging Israel to return to its convenantal Punisher in order to avail itself of his medicinal prowess:
Come, let us return to the LORD;
for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;
he has struck down, and he will bind us up.
Posted in textures | Tagged biblical reflection, Hosea, textures | Leave a Comment »
Something has changed.
We used to have a few Blue Jays around here and from time to time they’d stop by to cherry-pick the peanuts in the shell that I put out in a feeder made for just that.
Now, the Jay Tribe seems to have posted a sentry. Within seconds or minutes of refilling the feeder, I hear the signature piercing call of a Jay and soon a bevy of them has showed up in their blue suits for a feeding frenzy that easily clears out the feeder in thirty minutes.
It’s pretty spectacular.
Posted in my hometown | Tagged birding, fauna | Leave a Comment »
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Good grief, the monster stole the maiden and there’s no time left in the movie for rescuing maidens!
But listen to the music they make … Continue Reading »
Posted in reseña | Tagged Alison Krauss, music, reseña, Robert Plant | Leave a Comment »
By the time the writer gets to his exquisitely synthetic declaration, the Johannine tradition has already provided a reference point in the shadow of which mean dualisms fade:
Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.
The ‘Johannine community’ is a hypothetical entity that serves a deliciously heuristic role in the interpretation of the corresponding literature, even in those moments when nobody is quite sure what it is. One need not be skeptical about speculation so long as it knows its own mood. Probing for the legacy of John in a historical human community is no idle task and was carried out with particular élan by, say, the late Raymond Brown, S.S. Continue Reading »
Posted in textures | Tagged 3 John, biblical reflection, John, textures | Leave a Comment »
Only rarely does human language capture such a rich swath of reality in a short declaration as here:
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
Human experience could almost be considered a fleshing out of this fundamental dogma. Continue Reading »
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I remember reading years ago of some brain surgeons–maybe they were cardiac surgeons, the important thing is that they knew–who customarily piped Maurice Ravel’s Boléro into the operating room for the calming effect of its rhythmic regularity. Continue Reading »
Posted in reseña | Tagged Berliner Philharmoniker, Maurice Ravel, music, Pierre Boulez, reseña | Leave a Comment »
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Few books or films about a living monarch can avoid caricature. Royalty as a fact on the ground runs so contrary to the spirit of modernity—yet there they are!—and still holds such sentimental power for many ‘subjects’. The result is the virtual impossibility of a civil discussion about gradated pros and cons. Continue Reading »
Posted in reseña | Tagged film, Helen Mirren, Stephen Frears | Leave a Comment »
The alienation of knowledge from loving action in the life of human beings and human communities is hardly a modern problem. Yet the systematic divorce of ‘mind and heart’ or ‘heart and head’ arguably is.
Only a post-Descartian distinction of the knowing being from the object of his or her knowledge could become the breeding ground for the dualism the has become received truth for generations of Bible readers who promptly project such epistemological nonsense back onto its pages. Continue Reading »
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Tiempos atrás, la vida me otorgó la satisfacción de compartir aulas y espacios pastorales con un amigo y colega costarricense quien no ha flaqueado en mantener los lazos de la amistad desde mi emigración hacia la patria en 2004. Recientemente el mencionado Alexander Cabezas, ahora miembro imprescindible del equipo de Viva Juntos por la Niñez en Costa Rica, se permitió ventilar unos pensamientos que a este peregrino vivificaron el corazón. Continue Reading »
Posted in denkschrift | Tagged theological education | 3 Comments »
The water in the bird bath is well frozen this morning in our Indianapolis back yard, this in spite the battery-powered ‘bubbler’ I installed as a vacation task this week. Somewhere in the house there lurks a birdbath heater that I bought in the summer in ant-like preparation for winter and then inserted into some perfect space with squirrel-like absence of a record. It’ll turn up. Continue Reading »
Posted in my hometown | Tagged birding, fauna | Leave a Comment »
Canter Bridge 