“The burden of existence calls for a commensurate justification of our being. The fact that we are alive, that we have agency, that we are capable of such tremendous heights and depths emotionally, that our minds have such a capacity for love and creation and reason, that our subjective experiences appear to have irreducible meaning and value despite the fact that they are subjective – all of these things burden us. The beauty and goodness of our particular being demands some justification: What right do I have to such a life? Without a justification, we feel like phonies, frauds, failures, or, at best, lost.”

Alan Noble Disruptive Witness

“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

“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

“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

“As an example, Americans who watch an average amount of TV and film, and listen to modern music, will probably find it incredibly difficult not to believe that their lives can be justified if they find and marry the right person. Ernest Becker argues that the modern relationship is all many of us have left after the so-called ‘death of God.’ When another human being looks directly into your eyes and confesses their self-giving love to you for life, that is a profound affirmation of your existence. In the church, we believe that marriage reflects something of the relationship with Christ and his church, and so we have a way of explaining why marriage feels so validating: it is an echo of Christ’s justification of his church, his body. But it is only an echo, because unlike Christ, ‘No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll on some way on both parties.’ If you look to any other person to give your life justification and meaning, you will eventually resent them and leave disillusioned. Yet this myth, this vision of fullness, continues to be one of the most enduring in the West. And we have seen this myth repeated in a million stories, so that no matter how many times we personally experience its emptiness, we still find it alluring.”

Alan Noble Disruptive Witness