“Far more renowned than Strabo in his time was Dio Chrysostom – Dio of the Golden Mouth (A.D. 40-120)... Dio left behind him eighty orations. For us today they contain more wind than meat; they suffer from empty amplification, deceptive analogies, and rhetorical tricks; they stretch half an idea to half a hundred pages... ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said the honest Trajan, ‘but I love you as myself.’... Probably what drew people to him was not his fine Attic Greek, but the courage of his denunciations. Almost alone in pagan antiquity he condemned prostitution; and few writers of his time so openly attacked the institution of slavery. (He was a bit vexed, however, when he found that his slaves had run away.)”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“David Foster Wallace famously described this background belief: ‘Everything in my own immediate experience supports my belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.’ Although Wallace refers to this basic belief as ‘hard-wired,’ I think a more historically informed take is that while we naturally perceive the world through our own experiences, the sense that we are the absolute centre of the universe was much more difficult to believe in the 1400s, when the universe was seen as a cosmos with God at the centre. The temptation is to believe that the way we experience life today is fundamentally the same as someone six hundred years ago except for our material conditions, but the image of ourselves as the authoritative interpreters and protagonists in the story of existence is a fundamentally modern construct. This construct involves a movement we need to challenge if we are to address a distracted, secular age.”

Alan Noble Disruptive Witness

“The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.”

Mark Twain quoted in Tony Robbins Unlimited Power

“As the processes of secularization, individualism, and globalism have crept on, most communities in the West have had fewer and fewer shared holidays, let alone seasons. Again, time has been robbed of its natural cadences and instead appears as the raw material we use to cultivate our own identities. And yet, right after [American] Thanksgiving, the nation undergoes a massive transformation. Decorations go up, and our musical playlists, clothes, and greetings all change. Families return home to be with one another. Companies give their employees bonuses and time off. Stores close. Cities decorate their streets with lights. The normal flow of life is altered. Nothing captures this change so powerfully as Christmas lights. For about a month the night sky is lit up with color, enchanting the suburbs and hinting at a transcendent truth: this time is not like other times. What makes the Advent season stand out so starkly is that our culture has virtually no other holy days left. No other holiday reshapes our collective imagination for so long. Christmas disrupts nearly every part of our society, so we are left believing it must signify something. The Advent season is capable of forcing people to see there is more to being than the pull of modern secular consumerist life. However, as Charlie Brown remind us every year, Christmas is constantly co-opted for secular purposes that work to undermine whatever disruptive force the season still retains. While I don’t believe it’s possible for secularization to completely stifle the otherness of the holiday, it does pose a challenge for the church if we are to have a disruptive witness.”

Alan Noble Disruptive Witness

“And yet, if what lies inside a woman’s womb in those first months isn’t a life, per se, it is also not nothing.”

Kat Rosenfeld in a thoughtful piece “The Men Who Lost Their Babies” (to miscarriage or abortion) in The Free Press Feb. 8, 2025 [https://www.thefp.com/p/how-men-feel-about-pregnancy-loss] but that per se and effort to have it both ways is revealingly feeble.

“Primitive societies commonly attributed magical powers to their chieftains; The Pharaohs Egypt, the incas of Peru, the emperors of Japan were all revered as divine being; The Roman Caesars bore the title Pontifex Maximus. In modern totalitarian despotisms, where the party structure provides a travesty of a church, the simultaneous control of party and state is the very essence of a dictator’s authority. We need not be surprised, then, that in the Middle Ages also there were rulers who aspired to supreme spiritual and temporal power. The truly exceptional thing is that in medieval times there were always at least two claimants to the role, each commanding a formidable apparatus of government, and that for century after century neither was able to dominate the other completely, so that the duality persisted, was eventually rationalized in works of political theory and ultimately built into the structure of European society. This situation profoundly influenced the development of Western constitutionalism.”

Author’s “Introduction” to Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300

“Here is someone who with a great effort is going to say something very silly.”

Terence, quoted in Pascal Pensées

“For as long as people have been writing, there have been other people that want to prevent that writing from reaching the public. Around 600BC King Jehoiakim of Judah burnt a scroll containing a prophecy he did not like. Plato supposedly loathed work by Democritus, another philosopher, and sought to have it destroyed. (Ironically in his dialogues he warns of ‘the danger of becoming misologists’—ie, people who hate reasoning or ideas.)”

Rachel Lloyd, “Deputy culture editor” in “The Economist this weekend” email Feb. 22, 2025 [the big point here being the word “misologist”].