You know you have a problem when Saint Francis is remembered primarily as someone holding a rabbit, preaching to birds. Holding rabbits and preaching to birds is a good thing, but you can forget that he was about reforming the church by challenging the presumptions about wealth. I am reminded of Dorothy Day’s response when it was suggested to her that she was saint: “you are not going to get rid of me that easily.”
Stanley Hauerwas, in conversation with Romand Coles, in Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary
Category: Excerpts
Excerpt #31: orthodoxy
The first thing I need to say is that I defend “orthodoxy” because I think the hard-won wisdom of the church is true. Too often it is forgotten that that, for example, that the canon of the Scripture is “orthodoxy.” If the church had not decided against Marcion – that is, if the church had followed Marcion in eliminating the Old Testament and the Gospels because they were too Jewish – then we would have appeared more coherent, but we would have lost the tension that is at the heart of the Christian faith: Christians worship the Lord of Israel. It is too often forgotten that “trinity” names a reading rule that demands that Christians read the Old Testament as “our” scripture. That means we can never avoid the challenge of Jewish readings to our readings. So “orthodoxy” is not the avoidance of argument. Orthodoxy is the naming of arguments across time that must take place is we are to be faithful to Jesus.
Stanley Hauerwas, in conversation with Romand Coles, in Christianity, Democracy and The Radical Ordinary
Excerpt #30: old Chinese landscapes
Old Chinese landscape painting reveal, among towering mountains, the frail outline of a roof or a tiny human figure passing along a road on foot or horseback. These landscapes are almost always populated. There is no implication of a dehumanized interest in nature “for its own sake.” What is represented is a world in which humans belong, but which does not belong to humans in any tidy economic sense; the Creation provides a place for humans, but it is greater than humanity and within it even great men are small. Such humility is the consequence of an accurate insight, ecological in its bearing, not a pious deference to “spiritual” value.
Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth” in The Unsettling of America
Justin DaMetz 