Sublime

the focus on Jesus as a continuous human subject, born, maturing, dying.

humans still stand out by their failure to be clearly limited by a particular nature as other creatures are.

Christ clarifies and specifies the nature, aim, and trustworthiness of all God’s dealings with us because Christ is where those dealings with us come to ultimate fruition.

There is the common ground of the common good, and there are the semi-private domains of our diverse religious traditions. We are responsible to society for the former, to our own community for the latter.

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it.

Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, all human beings are endowed with three “intrinsic dignities”: infinite worth, equality, and uniqueness.10

This lack of human uniformity and fixity, though it distinguishes us from God, need not be lamented.

God is the objective reality of personhood.