Sublime

His work is one of the great literary accounts of the psychic costs of reification, of what he calls “a peculiar malign abstractness” within the culture of mid-twentieth-century capitalism.

It brings us back again to the ruthlessness of the idea of sanctioned truths, exclusive ways of understanding the mystery of existence, as ordained by the officers of religious institutions. Fortunately, priests have never had it all their own way in the history of religion.

Thinking is a creative act that can disclose or discover new meanings in old stories, even if the way they are read departs from the interpretations of the scholars who have assumed ownership of the material.

The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyrical strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality

In the modern world of theology and biblical studies, scholars began believing that they had to establish first the ancient “meaning” of the text and only after that ask what doctrine, theology, or ethics modern Christians should derive from those ancient texts today.

A vision of life together in service to the formation of erotic souls must reckon with the imperialist habits of mind born of whiteness that imagine peoples through boundary identities.

We look for patterns. We look for what we know how to see.