Something, my smarter, more beautiful better said ages ago and I jotted it down in a text file.
“Medicine robs of us of our ability to tell the story of our death.”
“A community’s willingness to encourage children is a sign of its confidence in itself and its people. For children are a community’s sign to the future that life, in spite of its hardship and tedium, is worthwhile.”
Stanley Hauerwas
A community of character p209
“But please, where does the story about poor Lazarus say anything about his ‘heart’?… The really frightening thing about the story is precisely the fact that it is not moralised but simply tells about the poor and the rich, the promise to one and the threat to the other.”
Bonhoeffer on the errors of “spiritualising” a text like Luke 16:19-30
In “reflections on the bible”
Hendrickson 2004
organised medicine has practically ceased to be the art of healing the curable, and consoling the hopeless and has turned into a grotesque priest hood concerned with salvation and has become a law onto itself. The policies that promise the public some control over the medical endeavour tend to overlook the fact that to achieve their purpose they must control a church, not an industry.
P249
Ivan Illich
Medical nemesis.
Wonderful quote that is forming the question for my dissertation even as I read it.
This is a lecture i recorded from the big medical conference I was at at the end of June. The guy speaking is a big name in emergency medicine circles. He’s quite the rhetorician and reminds us of the humanity needed to be with sick people. Worth a watch even if you’re not a medic.
“the pharmaceutical invasion leads him to medication, by himself or by others, that reduces his ability to cope with a body for which he can still care.”
Ivan Illich
Medical Nemesis
1976
(cheers to Dave Knowles for the tip off to this book a year or so ago…)
Kevin linked to this piece by Ben Myers and it’s great, but this is my fav:
When the church’s singing is structured around Israel’s psalms, there is a constant reminder that worship is not primarily a matter of personal choice; that the experience of worship is not primarily my own private experience; that the voice in worship is not even primarily my voice, but the voice of Israel, the voice of Christ, the voice of Christ’s people gathered across time and space, learning together how to transmute all the varied raw materials of human experience into the praise of God through the alchemy of Jesus Christ.
As someone who is involved in leading worship, this helps articulate my frustration and desire to do better.
