Performing the faith

I took a big break from theology following the masters. Now it’s lovely to come back to it as a ‘non-productivity’ based activity.

From performing the faith by Hauerwas

what it means to be ethically well formed is having one’a imagination trained to regard the world not as a given but as truly a gift from God. A better way to describe Christian ethics then is not as a choosing or deciding what is the right thing to do but being educated in the art of rightly accepting gifts.

P92

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Grapes of Wrath Quote

Just as the family have sold up everything and ready to hit the road for California.

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

Grapes of wrath p88

The drugs still don’t work

“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…)

From “can a pacifist think about war”

“christians have never killed as willingly as when they have been asked to do so for ‘freedom'”

p135
dispatches from the front
Stanley hauerwas.

And a bit from dogmatics

“if we face the fact of the church’s humanity, we cannot release it from the task of pursuing academic theology and we must thus accept in principle the task of a regular dogmatics.”

Dogmatics I.1 p277
Karl Barth

A little bit from After Virtue

“but, unlike charity, benevolence as a virtue became a license for almost any kind of manipulative intervention in the affairs of others”

Alasdair Macintyre
After Virtue 3rd edition
p232

The Dignity of Difference

God is universal, religions are particular. Religion is the translation of God into a particular language and thus into the life of a group, a nation, a community of faith.

Sacks J. The Dignity of Difference : How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London: Continuum; 2002. p55

Any thoughts on that? It seems that Sacks is suggesting that the universal is the key part and the particular less so. Though he may be saying quite the opposite, I’m working this out as I go…

This, I think, is his key premise.

God, the creator of humanity, having made a covenant with all humanity, then turns to one people and commands it to be different in order to teach humanity the dignity of difference.

p53