Some Quotes
Widely diverse reading goining on. Here are some nice quotes from three different reads.
First God’s Politics (2005) by Jim Wallis.
Christ commands us to not only see the splinter in our adversary’s eye but also the beams in our own…To name the face of evil in the brutality of terrorist attacks is good theology, but to say they are evil and we are good is bad theology that can lead to dangerous foriegn policy…Christ instructs us to love our enemies, which does not mean a submission to their hostile agendas or dominations, but does mean treating them as human beings created in the image of God and respecting their human rights as adversaries and even as prisoners…The words of Jesus are either authoritative for Christians, or they are not. And they are not set aside by the very real threat of terrorism. They do not easily lend themselves to the missions of nation-states that would usurpthe prerogatives of God. the threat of terrorism does not overturn Christian ethics…
The issue here is not partisan politics, and there are no easy political solutions. The ruling party has increasingly struck a religious tone in an agressive foreign policy that seems much more nationalistic than Christian, while the opposition party has offered more confusion than clarity.
Next, Two Years Before the Mast (1840) by Richard Henry Dana.
“I say! you know what countryman ‘e be?”
“Yes,” I said, “he’s a German.”
“What kind of German?” said the cook.
“He belongs to Bremen,” said I.
“Are you sure o’ dat?” said he.
I satisfied him on that point by saying that he could speak no language but the German and English.
“I’m plaguy glad o’ dat,” said the cook. “I was mighty ‘fraid he was a Fin. I tell you what, I been plaguy civil to that man all the voyage.”
I asked him the reason of this, and found that he was fully possesed with the notion that Fins are wizards, and especially have power over winds and storms. I tried to reason with him about it, but he was not to be moved. He had been in a vessel to the Sandwich Islands, in which the sail-maker was a Fin, and could do anything he was of a mind to…
As I still doubted, he said he would leave it to John, who was the oldest seaman aboard, and would know, if anybody did. John, to be sure, was the oldest, and at the same time the most ignorant, man in the ship; but I consented to have him called. The cook stated the matter to him, and John, as I anticipated, sided with the cook, and said that he himself had been in a ship where they had a head wind for a fortnight and the captain found out at last that one of the men, whom he had had some hard words with a short time before, was a Fin, and immediately told him if he didn’t stop the head wind he would shut him down in the fore peak. The Fin would not give in, and the captain shut him down in the fore peak, and would not give him anything to eat. The Fin held out for a day and a half, when he could not stand it any longer, and did something or other which brought the wind round again, and they let him up.
“There,” said the cook, “what you think o’ dat?”
I told him I had no doubt it was true, and that it would have been odd if the wind had not changed in fifteen days, Fin or no Fin.
“Oh,” says he, “go ’way! You think, ’cause you been to college, you know better than anybody. You know better than them as has seen it with their own eyes. You wait till you’ve been to sea as long as I have, and you’ll know.”
Third, Danse Macabre (1981) by Stephen King.
The genre we’re talking about, whether it be in terms of books, film, or TV, is really all one: make-believe horrors. And one of the questions that frequently comes up…is: Why do you want to make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in the world?The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools–to dismantle themselves. The Greek term catharsis is as old as Greek drama, and it has been used rather too glibly by some practitioners in my field to justify what they do, but it still has its limited uses here. The dream of horror is in itself an out-letting and a lancing…and it may well be that the mass-media dream of horror can sometimes become a nationwide analyst’s couch.
