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Showing posts from January, 2017

The Old Church

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The church that I belong to seems old. It has lost the ability to grow and it deteriorates with age. But it isn’t old just in the sense of losing its capacity to grow, in its energy; it is old in the sense that it imagines itself as old, and places itself at a time more than one hundred years ago, around the time of 1850 or so. That was the time when science never heard of natural selection. A time that was still pre-industrial and climate change was far into the future. It was a time when race was solidly understood by the majority of people as a great divide and a biological imperative. It was a time before the age of mass destruction from warfare and mass shootings. It was a time before even the term “homosexual” was known and used, and certainly not other terms such as “trans-sexual,” “queer,” “gay.” It was pre-dispensationalist, and so end times were not given so easily as an excuse for inaction. It was a time before the landmark collection, Essays and Reviews , was publish

The Beautiful Book

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There is a sense in which you can take any sign whatsoever, whether a tree, a musical note, a word, and find ambiguity, find a space that resonates and echoes until you lose it completely and you wonder, What did that mean? There is also a sense in which you can take any sign and apply it almost exactly, precisely to a given situation. You have the sense that you know it completely. Signs are like this, like a jazz composition, that the composer has written down and gives to a few different bands to play. All the bands have the same musical notations, the signs, and they appears exactly the same on the page. Yet all the bands will play a different song, if only slightly different, playing within the ambiguous space of the composer’s signs. That is language. Everyone knows what it is; and no one knows what it is. Nietzsche apparently felt that truth is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms...illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten.” Umb