12/24/2015
11/27/2015
Pietism
Pietism (/ˈpaɪɨtɪsm/, from the word piety) was a movement within Lutheranism that began in the late 17th century, reached its zenith in the mid-18th century, and declined through the 19th century, and had almost vanished in America by the end of the 20th century. While declining as an identifiable Lutheran group, some of its theological tenets influenced Protestantism and Anabaptism generally, inspiring the Anglican priest John Wesley to begin the Methodist movement and Alexander Mack to begin the Brethren movement. The Pietist movement combined the Lutheranism of the time with the Reformed emphasis on individual piety and living a vigorous Christian life.[1] Though pietism shares an emphasis on personal behavior with the Puritan movement, and the two are often confused, there are important differences, particularly in the concept of the role of religion in government.[2]
Full reading / Picture below: Der breite und der schmale Weg
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10/28/2015
9/27/2015
If ...
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
Rudyard Kipling
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8/31/2015
7/30/2015
The Bruges Speech
Prime Minister, Rector, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:
First, may I thank you for giving me the opportunity to return to Bruges and in very different circumstances from my last visit shortly after the Zeebrugge Ferry disaster, when Belgian courage and the devotion of your doctors and nurses saved so many British lives.
And second, may I say what a pleasure it is to speak at the College of Europe under the distinguished leadership of its Rector [Professor Lukaszewski]. The College plays a vital and increasingly important part in the life of the European Community.
And third, may I also thank you for inviting me to deliver my address in this magnificent hall. What better place to speak of Europe's future than a building which so gloriously recalls the greatness that Europe had already achieved over 600 years ago.
Your city of Bruges has many other historical associations for us in Britain. Geoffrey Chaucer was a frequent visitor here. And the first book to be printed in the English language was produced here in Bruges by William Caxton.
Britain and Europe
Mr. Chairman, you have invited me to speak on the subject of Britain and Europe. Perhaps I should congratulate you on your courage. If you believe some of the things said and written about my views on Europe, it must seem rather like inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence!
I want to start by disposing of some myths about my country, Britain, and its relationship with Europe and to do that, I must say something about the identity of Europe itself.
Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the European idea the property of any group or institution.
We British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation. Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.
For three hundred years, we were part of the Roman Empire and our maps still trace the straight lines of the roads the Romans built. Our ancestors - Celts, Saxons, Danes - came from the Continent. Our nation was - in that favourite Community word - "restructured" under the Norman and Angevin rule in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
This year, we celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the glorious revolution in which the British crown passed to Prince William of Orange and Queen Mary.
Visit the great churches and cathedrals of Britain, read our literature and listen to our language: all bear witness to the cultural riches which we have drawn from Europe and other Europeans from us.
We in Britain are rightly proud of the way in which, since Magna Carta in the year 1215, we have pioneered and developed representative institutions to stand as bastions of freedom. And proud too of the way in which for centuries Britain was a home for people from the rest of Europe who sought sanctuary from tyranny.
But we know that without the European legacy of political ideas we could not have achieved as much as we did. From classical and mediaeval thought we have borrowed that concept of the rule of law which marks out a civilised society from barbarism.
And on that idea of Christendom, to which the Rector referred - Christendom for long synonymous with Europe - with its recognition of the unique and spiritual nature of the individual, on that idea, we still base our belief in personal liberty and other human rights [...]
6/29/2015
5/29/2015
4/18/2015
On Liberty
[...] Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant - society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it - its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. [...]
(On Liberty, John Stuart Mill, 1869 - Chapter I: Introductory - Link to the photo above)
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3/27/2015
2/28/2015
The Transcendent Profane
[...] In other words, we humans, even we bourgeois humans, cannot get along without transcendence - faith in a past, hope for a future, justified by larger considerations. If we don’t have religious hope and faith, we’ll substitute hope and faith in art or science or national learning. If we don’t have art or science or national learning or Anglicanism, we’ll substitute fundamentalism or the Rapture. If we don’t have fundamentalism or the Rapture or the local St.Wenceslaus parish we’ll substitute our family or the rebuilt antique car. It’s a consequence of the human ability to symbolize, a fixture of our philosophical psychology.
We might as well acknowledge it, if only to keep watch on transcendence and prevent it from doing mischief, as did once a Russian hope for the Revolution and as now does a Saudi Arabian faith in an Islamic past. The Bulgarian-French critic Tzvetan Todorov, who has seen totalitarianism, warns that 'democracies put their own existence in jeopardy if they neglect the human need for transcendence.' Michael Ignatieff put it well: 'The question of whether . . . the needs we once called religious can perish without consequence ... remains central to understanding the quality of modern man’s happiness.' Evidently the answer is no, religion cannot perish without consequences. There are bad consequences and there will be more. That is not a reason to return to the older sureties. It is a reason to take seriously the transcendent in our bourgeois lives.
1/29/2015
The Cardsharps
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| The Cardsharps, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1594) |
What I really love when I look at this painting is the evidence of everybody can be corrupted and, meanwhile, a corrupt. If you pay attention on the boys playing cards, is likely you find the same inference as me: not only the one on the left is being a victim, but also the one on the right. One final question to reflect: can we say the last one is an innocent ... or not?
More: Kimbell Art Museum
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