Why We Fast

– Because we are not enough.

– Because we can’t be filled.

In any case, fast days require an anti-Pelagian caution:

[The dualist view of the soul] is in fact a peculiarly modern view of the matter, not much older than the seventeenth-century philosophy of Descartes. While it is now the model to which most of us habitually revert when talking about the soul — whether we believe in such things or not– it has scant basis in either Christian or Jewish tradition. The “living soul” of scripture is the whole corporeal and spiritual totality of a person whom the breath of God has wakened to life.

David Bentley Hart, “The Soul of a Controversy,” in In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments (Eerdmans, 2009).

On Giving Up

I’m trying to make more room in my life of late… not really “room” for anything, except the intangibles: peace, breath, space, prayer. As a graduate student, even one to whom both the fates and both sides of the family have been exceedingly generous, there’s a fear of not being able to provide for one’s needs that leads to drawers of (worn, stretched out, stained, or too-small) clothes that won’t shut, pantries of (stale, out-of date) staples in which one cannot find anything, and rubbermaid containers of bits and pieces of crafty things that one just might need someday (okay, I can’t really bring myself to get rid of this).

So. Clearing out, making space.

I decided, today, to do a bit of clearing out of my “currently reading” list as well, to make a bit of space there. I’m trying to cure myself of the guilty notion that I must finish absolutely everything on my list, come hell, high water, or just skimming my eyes over the page and pretending to absorb the text. So I decided that I had absorbed pretty much all I need at the moment out of Aristotle’s Categories, and that I had benefited about as much as I will at the moment out of Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life. I will probably– almost certainly– come back to both of them in the future, but when I found myself reading Sertillange in precisely the inattentive way he condemns, I knew it was time to put it aside. Now the only guilty text on my list is Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White which, I have to say, may be the next to go.

Soloveitchik for Valentine’s Day

If God had not joined the community of Adam and Eve, they would have never been able and would have never cared to make the paradoxical leap over the gap, indeed abyss, separating two individuals whose personal experiential messages are written in a private code undecipherable by anyone else. Without the covenantal experience of the prophetic or prayerful colloquy, Adam absconditus would have persisted in his he-role and Eve abscondita in her she-role, unknown to and distant from each other. Only when God emerged from the transcendent darkness of He-anonymity into the illumined spaces of community knowability and changed man with an ethical and moral mission, did Adam absconditus and Eve abscondita, while revealing themselves to God in prayer and in unqualified commitment, also reveal themselves to each other in sympathy and love on the one hand and in common action on the other.

Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, 65-66

You Don’t Have to Like It

…but you shouldn’t just dismiss it.

Moreover, the ‘average person’ in contemporary American society is literate, educated, and devotes a tremendous amount of time to learning new skills, whether on the Internet or the bike path, in the boardroom or the kitchen. But art is rarely a part of this continuing education because people believe that art needs no preparation. It should simply ‘speak’ to them, clearly and right away, or else it is ‘elitist.’ Moreover, there is a view that art, somehow, should communicate to this average person, who often has no real interest in putting in the time and effort required to understand and appreciate the hard-won results of artistic practice.

Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, 163

For my Adviser

And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Soloveitchik on Prayer

it remains unalterably true that the very essence of prayer is the covenantal experience of being together with and talking to God and that the concrete performance such as the recitation of texts represents the technique of implementation of prayer and not prayer itself.

Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, 34.

On Selling with Religion

I once did a survey of the theme Bibles available in my local Borders. It wasn’t a happy sight. This passage reminded me of that, as well as the “helps for pastors” published on the internet every time a new Narnia movie comes out.

Ward cautions, ‘What we are witnessing in Western culture today is the liquidation of ‘religion’ through its commodification.’ The rise in discourse about religion and spirituality in the public sphere has done much to facilitate this ‘commodification,’ which now makes it possible for religion and spirituality to function as marketable brands for music, film, books, and even art.

-Daniel A. Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008) 73.

Academic Papers Used to Have Better Titles

From the Penguin edition of The Pickwick Papers:

The Pickwickians, Note 1. Speculations on the Source of the Hampstead Ponds, with some Observations on the Theory of Tittlebats: Pickwick’s first paper, and our first dilemma. The title recalls John Hill’s ‘Dissertation on Stittlebacks’, in his Review of the Works of the Royal Society (1751), satirizing William Arderon’s ‘Observations’ to the Royal Society ‘on the Banstickle, or Prickelbag, alias Prickleback, and also Fish in General’ (1747).

More from Jacobs

Almost everything I have written in these pages assumes something that in the history of reading has rarely been true: abundant and inexpensive books. I have to make an effort to remember what an extraordinary blessing this is.

(Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 58)

Currently Reading, 5 February 2012

Look, My List is Shorter!

Tolstoy, War and Peace

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues*

Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir

Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life*

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Aristotle, The Categories (This is not for fun)

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

Finished this week:

Kenneth Morris, Book of the Three Dragons

Daniel A. Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics and Orthodoxy (Time for a little break from Chesterton)

* These books need to be finished soon, because they have to be returned to the library. Unfortunately, due to a schedule snafu and other occurrences I am teaching four times this week, so I’m not sure how much progress I will make.

The nice thing about teaching four times in a week is that I’ll be far too busy to worry about the things that usually make me anxious.