“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
“Philip, by the grace of God king of the French, to Boniface who acts as though he were pope, little or no greeting. Let your great fatuity know that in temporalities we are subject to no-one…”
Philip IV “the Fair” of France responding to a letter from Pope Boniface VIII rebuking the king for appointing clerics without regard to papal wishes, a letter that was conspicuously burned, quoted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300
“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
“The Fourth Gospel does not pretend to be a biography of Jesus; it is a presentation of Christ from the theological point of view, as the divine Logos or Word, creator of the world and redeemer of mankind. It contradicts the synoptic gospels in a hundred details and in its general picture of Christ. The half-Gnostic character of the work, and its emphasis on metaphysical ideas, have led many Christian scholars to doubt that its author was the apostle John. Experience suggests, however, that an old tradition must not be too quickly rejected; our ancestors were not all fools.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Here is someone who with a great effort is going to say something very silly.”
Terence, quoted in Pascal Pensées
“Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.”
Elbert Hubbard according to www.quotationspage.com as of Dec. 10, 2005.