While rearranging books today, I opened my copy of G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy to a passage where he discusses what we would associate today with New Age thought. There I found this remarkable quote:

Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

Is there a Christian writer alive today who writes with such clarity and common sense? If there is, I am not aware of him.

Almost all non-fiction books nowadays have an opening "Acknowledgments" section, wherein the author thanks his dog, his neighbor, his priest, his colleagues, his editor, and perhaps even his family or the Almighty Himself. It is not often that one finds a line of prose in one of these sections that is worth quoting, but these words by J. Budziszewski are surely worthy of some kind of acknowledgment award, if such things existed:

Above all others I thank the triune God, Father of Lights, Kindler of Wisdom, without whom all thought is darkness and all knowledge dusk. Now my mind is smoke; on that Day, O Lord, will it be fire.

The line is from his Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, a fine book in its own right. It's just a shame no one knows how to pronounce the author's name.

Since I am awash in a sea of schoolwork and know not how to end it, I have no time to blog. So in lieu of an actual post I offer a few words from a mind far more attuned to the beauty of Christ than I:

                                  Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. / Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; / world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
                                  In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                                  Is immortal diamond.

from Gerard Manley Hopkins, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection"

Here is David K. Naugle on the late Pope John Paul II's vision for a Christian transformation of human culture:

Given that culture is the history-shaping outcome of humanity's native philosophical and religious impulse, in order to alter human experience for the better, a radical transformation must take place at the cultural level and in the set of basic ideas that make it up. The pontiff's settled solution, therefore, to the modern problem of human pulverization is through the instrumentality of culture change, and indeed a change in its underlying philosophy and religion as the ultimate sources from which it springs. While there may be a place for active resistance against the forces of terror, it seems that for Wojtyla such efforts deal only with the symptoms, not with the root causes of the political and social disease. Change at the most primordial level, therefore, requires a metamorphosis in ultimate meaning through words - both human and divine - that conceptualize reality and frame human existence. Hence, in taking aim at this deeper level of reality, Wojtyla seeks to displace the well-ensconced ideologies responsible for the miseries of contemporary man through the proclamation and practice of a vibrant Christian humanism grown in Catholic soil. He has offered this fresh, comprehensive vision of life as a new basis for Western culture and as the wellspring of genuine hope.

- from Naugle's Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002) p. 42

Naugle, a Baptist philosopher, keeps up this congenial tone in his whole section on John Paul's concept of a Christian worldview. I've never given much serious consideration to the thought of the late pope (AKA Karol Wojtyla), but according to passages like this one he was a formidable thinker who proposed an inspired Christian vision for the renewal of human culture.

If there were an indignation meter that gauged words in the public lexicon of contemporary culture on their official offensiveness, the word "fundamentalist" would sit somewhere between "Klan member" and "Paris Hilton." I like to post this quote by Alvin Plantinga every now and then, simply because I think it needs to be presented as many different times and in as many different ways as possible:

I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term 'fundamentalist'. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like 'son of a bitch', more exactly 'sonovabitch', or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) 'sumbitch'. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of 'fundamentalist' (in this widely current use): it isn't simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like 'stupid sumbitch' (or maybe 'fascist sumbitch'?) than 'sumbitch' simpliciter. It isn't exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase 'considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.' The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like 'stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine'.

- Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief

Bill Vallicella on "The Demons of the Desert":

The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.

All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

"As we are often told nowadays, we live in a postmodern era; and postmodernists pride themselves on rejecting the classical foundationalism that we all learned at our mother's knee. Classical foundationalism has enjoyed a hegemony, a near consensus in the West from the Enlightenment to the very recent past. And according to the classical foundationalist, our beliefs, at least when properly founded, are objective in a double sense. The first sense is a Kantian sense; what is objective in this sense is what is not merely subjective, and what is subjective is what is private or peculiar to just some persons. According to classical foundationalism, well-founded belief is objective in this sense; at least in principle, any properly functioning human beings who think together about a disputed question with care and good will, can be expected to come to an agreement. Well-founded belief is objective in another sense as well: it has to do with, is successfully aimed at, objects, things, things in themselves, to borrow a phrase. Well-founded belief is often or unusually adequate to the thing; it has an adequatio ad rem. There are horses, in the world, and my thought of a given horse is indeed a thought of that horse. Furthermore, it is adequate to the horse, in the sense that the properties I take the horse to have are properties it really has. That it has those properties - the ones I take it to have - furthermore, does not depend upon me or upon how I think of it: the horse has those properties on its own account, independent of me or anyone else. My thought and belief is therefore objective in that it is centered upon an object independent of me; it is not directed to something I, as a subject, have construed or in some other way created.

Now what is characteristic of much postmodern thought is the rejection of objectivity in this second sense - often in the name of rejecting objectivity in the first sense. The typical argument for postmodern relativism leaps lightly from the claim that there is no objectivity of the first sort, to the claim that there is none of the second. As you have no doubt noticed, this is a whopping non sequitur; that hasn't curbed its popularity in the least. Classical foundationalism, so the argument runs, has failed: we now see that there is no rational procedure guaranteed to settle all disputes among people of good will; we do not necessarily share starting points for thought, together with forms of argument that are sufficient to settle all differences of opinion. That's the premise. The conclusion is that therefore we can't really think about objects independent of us, but only about something else, perhaps constructs we ourselves have brought into being. Put thus baldly, the argument does not inspire confidence; but even if we put it less baldly, is there really anything of substance here? In any event, by this route too we arrive at the thought that there isn't any such thing as truth that is independent of us and our thoughts. The idea seems to be that objectivity in the first, Kantian sense, necessarily goes with objectivity in the second, external sense, so that if our thought isn't objective in the first sense, then it isn't objective in the second sense either. And what has happened within at least some of so-called postmodernisms is that the quite proper rejection of the one - a rejection that would of course have received the enthusiastic support of Kuyper and Dooyeweerd - has been confused with the rejection, the demise of the other - an idea that Kuyper and Dooyweerd would have utterly rejected."

Alvin Plantinga, "Christian Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century," The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, pp. 332-334 (italics in original)

The Conservative Philosopher posts the following quote by David B. Hart from an article in the current issue of First Things:

Religion, after all (as everyone knows), is a realm of purely personal conviction sustained by faith, which is (as everyone also knows) an entirely irrational movement of the will, an indistinct impulse of saccharine sentiment, pathetic longing, childish credulity, and vague intuition. And theology, being the special language of religion, is by definition a collection of vacuous assertions, zealous exhortations, and beguiling fables; it is the peculiar patois of a private fixation or tribal allegiance, of interest perhaps to the psychopathologist or anthropologist, but of no greater scientific value than that; surely it has no proper field of study of its own, no real object to investigate, and whatever rules it obeys must be essentially arbitrary.

Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over the centuries, it has incubated speculative systems of extraordinary rigor and intricacy, many of whose questions and methods continue to inform contemporary philosophy; and it does, when all is said and done, constitute the single intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition uniting the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds. Even if one entirely avoids considering what metaphysical content one should attach to the word "God," one can still plausibly argue that theology is no more lacking in a substantial field of inquiry than are history, philosophy, the study of literature, or any of the other genuinely respectable university disciplines.

(James R. Stoner, Jr., et al., "Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium," First Things [May 2006]: 21-7, at 26 [italics in original])

I've added a new category on the left. The Quotes category will be where I post worthwhile words from the wise and the not-so wise. I'll inaugurate this new category with a classic quote by G. K. Chesterton. It's almost a century old, and some of the references are dated, but it still packs quite a punch:

But the new rebel is a Skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it.

Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.

In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

from G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it."

- Rene Descartes

"My guess is that Dawkins just doesn't know enough about the history of secular humanism to realise that Darwin killed off man at the same time as he killed off God."

- Sociologist Steve Fuller in an interview at The Guardian