Funny words and beautiful...from A.N.Wilson and J.R.R. Tolkien

I find this passage hilarious...

"Usually, if you talk to strangers in England, they resist being drawn. Fear of boredom, quite as much as fear of the possibility that one might be mad or sexually unreliable, explains their reticence. My uncle was impervious to any of the signals which might be given off on such occasion that the stranger might rather be left in peace. So urgent was his need to talk about Lampitts that any excuse must be found... His interlocutors would be truly puzzled, possibly edging away, wondering why this snowy-haired stranger... Should be addressing them on the subject of a family of whom they had never before heard." A.N. Wilson, "Incline Our Hearts", the first in a series of novels called "The Lampitt Chronicles"

And this one, from a piece in the New Yorker, exquisitely beautiful...

"There was the sound of harp and the clear singing of the minstrel; there spake he that had knowledge to unfold from far-off days the first beginning of men, telling how the Almighty wrought the earth, a vale of bright loveliness that the waters encircle..." From J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of "Beowulf".

Anglican Theologians- a list of some of the ones the Rambling Rector mostly likes

RICHARD HOOKER  1554-1600

“God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright."

Hooker helped to define Anglicanism theologically as a church continuous with historic Catholicism, but critical of both Puritanism on one side and Rome on the other. He defended the historic episcopate and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He also defended strongly the unity of the church and the secular state, a position that is no longer a common theme in Anglican theology.   

 F. D. Maurice  1805-1872

“Of all the spirits, I believe the spirit of judging is the worst, and it has had the rule of me, I cannot tell you how dreadfully and how long... This, I find has more hindered my progress in love and gentleness than all things else. I never knew what the words, "Judge not that ye be not judged," meant before; now they seem to me some of the most awful, necessary, and beautiful in the whole Word of God.”

“The truth is that every man is in Christ; the condemnation of every man is that he will not own the truth, he will not act as if it were true, that except he were joined with Christ, he could not think, breathe, live a single hour.”

Fredrick Denison Maurice converted to the Church of England from Nonconformity, and was a strong exponent of 19^th Century “Incarnational” theology. He was an outspoken advocate for social justice and democratic socialism, and was regarded with suspicion by the intellectual and ecclesiastical elite of his time.

Charles Gore, DD (22 January 1853 – 17 January 1932) was an English theologian and Anglican bishop. Born in 1853, Gore became one of the most influential of Anglican theologians. He helped reconcile the Church to some aspects of biblical criticism and scientific discovery, yet was Catholic in his interpretation of the faith and sacraments

… in 1890 a stir was created by the publication, under his editorship, of Lux Mundi, a series of essays by different writers, attempting to bring the Christian creed into a right relation to the modern growth of knowledge, scientific, historic, critical, and to modern problems of politics and ethics.
	William Porcher DuBose (April 11, 1836-August 18, 1918) was an American priest and theologian in the Episcopal Church in the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is remembered on August 18 on the Episcopal Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. His middle name, Porcher, is pronounced as if it were spelled por-shay. DuBose’s rigorous incarnational theology set him at odds with the prevailing revivalist mentality of American religion, particularly in the South. One of his most provocative proposals was the idea that even Satan might someday repent and be received back into the kingdom of heaven.
		1875-1941 “In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.” ― Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness

ROWAN WILLIAMS, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. B. 1950

In a careful, academic way, Bishop Rowan, along with such intellectual heavyweights as Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is calling us to a new appreciation for "the profundity of surfaces", to what Ricoeur has famously called a "second naïveté," and to do so without compromising a commitment to scientific method and the achievements of modernity. This calls for "the suspicion of suspicion," a kind of ultra-skepticism that leads to something like faith. 

   Perhaps we need not"...suggests Williams, "...be left with the bald alternativest of false naïveté...and manipulative reductionism." Ricoeur leads us, he believes, to a place of "fruitful and irresoluble  puzzlement."