Sublime

Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. may have understood American Protestantism better than anyone. By staging resistance at the center of ordinary life (again on buses and at diners), he revealed an overwhelming lack of flourishing.

Her impression of the day they have spent together seems dimly to envelop her, succession of images, slender black dog racing across a green garden, taste of sea salt on her lips, glittering warmth of the hotel dining room. Idea of God as an aesthetic principle, you have nothing to feel guilty for. He makes the tea as she draws down the kitchen bli

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

For not only is an odd man “not always” a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.

He believed in free will, questioned the doctrine of original sin, and thought that, when men act virtuously, it is by virtue of their own moral effort. If they act rightly, and are orthodox, they go to heaven as a reward of their virtues.

Adam and Eve disobeyed, doubted, tried to deceive. These are all complex acts of will. The old Christian theologies spoke of felix culpa, the fortunate fall. This is in effect another name for human agency, responsibility, even freedom. If we could do only those things God wills, we would not be truly free, though to discern the will of God and act

I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.