Don't drink the hemlock of today's Shakespeare scholars

 

[Shakespeare] scholars ... are participants in a “long-term project to discredit altogether the culture” of the West. Insofar as they succeed at shaping the minds and hearts of future generations, their project threatens us with civilizational suicide. Rescuing the Western soul from a tragic demise requires us to see their medicine for the hemlock it is. ...

Relentless as they are, the waves of Shakespeare abuse cannot help breaking upon the rock of the man and his achievements. Due to the Bard’s “unique combination of imaginative intelligence, skill, and creative genius,” he continues to be “cherished,” studied, and performed throughout the world. To encounter his works is to encounter a powerful reaffirmation of the complex, paradoxical, and liberating tradition of which he is the “principal poet.”

More.

The Jesuit headline that would never be: Abortion Ban in Indiana a Wake-Up Call for Pro-Choice Movement

 

Abortion Win in Kansas a Wake-Up Call for Pro-Life Movement

 

Indiana Is First State To Approve Near-Total Abortion Ban Post Roe

John Nelson Darby, famous religious innovator of The Rapture, was the youngest of six sons, another example in support of Frank Sulloway's thesis

 

J.N. Darby 1800-1882

1996

Sulloway is important for challenging the crisis theory of scientific revolutions propounded by Thomas Kuhn, showing how many revolutionary personalities, who tend to be later or last borns, rebelled against well established consensus views which though long in the tooth were in no danger of going away.

Darby's innovations, interestingly enough, came to him after experiencing serious injuries when he fell from a horse when he was still 26.  

The small, relational Christian community of just shut up

 For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.

 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.

And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

-- I Corinthians 14:33ff.

Reason 4,109 to avoid a church today

 For the land is full of adulterers; because of the curse the land mourns, and the pastures of the wilderness are dried up. Their course is evil, and their might is not right. Both prophet and priest are ungodly; even in my house I have found their wickedness, says the LORD.

-- Jeremiah 23:10f.

The creepy connubial Christ talk of the New Testament gets some of its inspiration from OT prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah

 For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called.

-- Isaiah 54:5

Surely as a wife treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye dealt treacherously with me, O house of Israel, saith the LORD.

-- Jeremiah 3:20

Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD:

-- Jeremiah 31:21

The young hope for a new tomorrow, the old have only yesterday

Forget stereotyping and paradox, Scripture affirms the immortality of . . . Zeus, whose children we are, and in whom we live and move and have our being

Even one of their own men, a prophet from Crete, has said about them, “The people of Crete are all liars, cruel animals, and lazy gluttons.”

 This is true.

-- Titus 1:12f.

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one, The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies! But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever, For in thee we live and move and have our being.

-- Epimenides, Cretica

 

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.   

 

-- Acts 17:28  

Pick your poison.

Nothing belongs to Caesar: The idea that Jesus believed anything else is preposterous

Tiberius

The earth is the Lord's.

-- Exodus 9:29

For all the earth is mine.

-- Exodus 19:5

Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD'S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is.

-- Deuteronomy 10:14

The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

-- Psalm 24:1

For the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof.

-- I Corinthians 10:26, 28

For all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine.

-- I Chronicles 29:11

The day is thine, the night also is thine.

-- Psalm 74:16 

The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine. 

-- Psalm 89:11

Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest?

-- Isaiah 66:1

Hihowareya

 

How

 

Why all this poetry?

 Poetry is not merely important to Christianity. It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice. The fact that most Christians would consider that assertion absurd does not invalidate it. Their disagreement only demonstrates how remote the contemporary Church has become from its own origins. It also suggests that sacred poetry is so interwoven into the fabric of Scripture and worship as to become invisible. At the risk of offending most believers, it is necessary to state a simple but ­unacknowledged truth: It is impossible to understand the full glory of Christianity without understanding its poetry. ...

No believer can ignore the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse. ... These ancient Hebrew and Aramaic poems remain vividly present in English—and not only for Christians—because the King James Bible had the good fortune to be translated in the age of Shakespeare. ...

What are the Beatitudes but a poem carefully shaped in the tradition of prophetic verse?... The Incarnation requires an ode, not an email. ... Sacred poetry is a human universal. Every culture has felt the need to invoke and describe the divine in the most potent language possible. Poetry itself seems to have originated in sacred ritual. Only gradually did the art expand into secular uses. Since the development of poetry as an art predates the invention of writing, the genealogy of sacred verse is lost in prehistory. It is always hard to assign an exact date or occasion to surviving ancient texts. Even the dating of the Old Testament is difficult to establish; the books were composed and compiled across a millennium.

Much more, here.

The inner light torments us

 Not sharp revenge, nor hell itself, can find

A fiercer torment than a guilty mind,

Which day and night doth dreadfully accuse,

Condemns the wretch, and still the charge renews.

-- John Dryden

Overall, only 10% of those diagnosed with breast cancer do not survive 5 years, and faith healer Beni Johnson of Redding, CA was among them

 Redding-based Bethel Church co-senior pastor Beni Johnson dies after battle with cancer

  

Breast Cancer Survival Rates

There must be sects among you, that the approved may become manifest

 As fire breaks out of flint by percussion, so wisdom and truth issueth out by the agitation of argument.

-- James Howell (c. 1594 -1666)

You will tire of living life to the full

  

 Satiety from all things else doth come,

Then life must to itself grow wearisome.

-- John Denham

The learners suffer, the ignorant rest

 The soul preferreth rest in ignorance before wearisome labour to know.

-- Richard Hooker

Self-annulling charity

Poor refugees, at first they purchase here;

And soon as denizen'd, they domineer.

 

-- John Dryden

Pope Francis makes an utter mockery of the Catholic faith, gives Nancy Pelosi communion in the Vatican though barred from it in the US

 

Friendship with the world is enmity with God

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 

-- James 4:4

And remember, my sentimental friend that a heart is not judged by how much you love but by how much you are loved by others.

-- Wizard of Oz to the Tin Man, 1939