Sublime

As the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade wrote, “The symbolic return to chaos is indispensable to any new creation.”

LESSONS FROM HISTORY We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely tempora

The way of Jewish tradition was always one of cumulative upbuilding.

Out of this same quarrel came foundational ideas about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, ideas premised on the belief, heretical to the medieval church, that there is no conflict between freedom and truth.

That can no longer be taken for granted. Postmodern societies are marked by their lack of moral consensus.

Christian tradition solid. The habitual conservatism of religion makes the liturgy inflexible, and Christian morality—often against its better knowledge and conscience—becomes a deadening legalism.

Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallise imagination to the point of fossilising it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, a

holy is where we enter the ideal; the good is how we make it real.

Sunday morning has become in far too many settings the occasion for a pep talk rather than provocation;