Ever since, the mere statement that one is a “Christian” is implicitly theological–and political….

Being a cradle catholic and revert I think I have strayed to all extremes and keep coming back to IS NOW as my only creed. To me Jesus is a way – my way of life and love.. and only know that I don’t know much at all.

I live by this weird line now – ‘nonsense is sense to those who survive eloquence’.

thank you for writing this heartfelt post!

and thank you to those who wrote the above comments (and Carl) — I thank God for your very being –

Theology stimulates an active intellectual search for God whereas mysticism speaks in stillness and silence. They complement each other and, hopefully, entwine themselves into a single spiritual tree. They can only do this if love enlivens both pursuits.

Re Augustine: I can’t remember the exact wording or where it ws written but Augustine, writing on grace and free will, stated that while we are unable to move ourselves toward God without grace “neither are we dumb stones” unable to move ourselves. Grace can be sought, prayed for, accepted or rejected.

A high school teacher of mine used to offer this little prayer: Give me the grace to accept your grace and the grace to ask for more.

Blessings to all.

I love your philosophy!

My philosophy in my nut-shell…..

If I am not open to others, I may never find out where they are coming from. And how terribly sad – because I might just want to visit there.

A lot of these dialectical tensions have been propagated by the world of philosophy

Or perhaps it’s that oppositional modes of thinking haven’t been propogated nearly as much by philosophy as by the near-abandonment of philology. Philology doesn’t get anywhere near the airtime, certainly, and that is naturally where dialects, in all their glorious subtlety, come into play. (Not dialectics, necessarily, but dialects.) You say tuhmeytoh; I say tuhmahtoh; and if no attempt is made by either of us to understand each other, we’ll soon be in a “chicken fight” over tomatoes.

As it happens, I don’t “believe in” the doctrine of Original Sin and subsequent Fall of Man, etc. as the church teaches it and so tend to keep silent on the subject with those who do (unless, of course, they tell me that I must), but does that mean the concept can’t have some meaning for me relative to someone who does?

Origin: something from which anything arises or is derived; source; fountainhead. Origin-al: belonging or pertaining to the origin or beginning of something, or to a thing at its beginning.

“Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be also. Blessed is he who stands at the beginning, for he shall know the end and shall not taste death.” ~ Jesus, Gospel of Thomas, 18

Did someone mention “Presence”?

The distinction between past, present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion. ~ Albert Einstein

Origin-al Sin: to fall short at any given point in time of manifesting our divine potent-ial.

You say Man fell short; I say Man falls short here and there, now and then; and, according to Romans 3:23, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”, so we’re all in very good company. Either interpretation of “Original Sin” can be subverted for nefarious ends, but what is it to our inherent relationship as members of the human family if you say tuhmeytoh and I say tuhmahtoh? Philosophy is the love of wisdom, not opinion.

I want be among those who holds you up in your questioning. If Augustine, or Pelagius, Thomas Aquinas, et al, and (dare it be said) even Jesus of Nazareth, had stopped ever stopped asking questions, we might not have the bounty of theology that we have today. I believe a person without questions is one without a sense of mystery. And without a sense of mystery, how can we ever presume to strive to be in relationship with/to it?