Matters of Interpretation

Text of the Week – Notes

You can reread … from a sense, often inchoate, that there’s more to this book than you have been yet able to receive.

Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

Text of the Week – Questions

I’ve often said that those who say having a childlike faith means not asking questions haven’t met too many children.

Rachel Held Evans

Liturgical exercises

I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Meditations on churchgoing

To be sure, the church is not the Kingdom, but neither is the life which Christians share together something less than the Kingdom’s inbreaking. For the hope necessary to sustain the journey and pilgrim alike is in fact the first fruits of the Kingdom, which we know to be God’s will for the whole of creation.

Stanley Hauerwas and Mark Sherwindt, “The Kingdom of God: An Ecclesial Space for Peace,” Word and World 2:2 (1982), 127-136, 136.

Sermons

A sermon should be like a tree.

H. Grady Davis, Design for Preaching (Fortress Press, 1958) – the best

Essays

… the essay … shakes off the illusion of a simple and fundamentally logical world, an illusion well suited to the defense of the status quo.

Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form”

Miscellaneous small epiphanies …

No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim; … Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God;

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from “Aurora Leigh”

… celebrations …

Every day is a gift. But some days are packaged better.

Sanhita Baruah

… explanations

Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.

Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry

Reading out loud

Hey, listen to this …

Jake Thiessen

Thinking out loud

I have opinions of my own – strong opinions – but I don’t always agree with them.

George H. W. Bush, quoted in Spin Magazine, November 1992; definitely a matter of interpretation

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

(Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina)