life on planet earth on Abstraction

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.

When conflict and division are driving both politics and media (including social media), the contrast between the way of the world and the way of Jesus stands out more than ever. How can pastors, task...

The politician Helen Violet Asquith (later Bonham Carter) was once attending a dinner with Winston Churchill, who initially seemed lost in abstraction for an awkwardly long period of time. Abruptly he...

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

...You are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don’t flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.

The most fundamental assumption in economics is scarcity. This, in effect, assumes away abundance. Thus, most mainstream economists are not prepared to deal with abundance. They have few concepts that...

...Descartes described us to be: thinking things that are containers for ideas. What if that is actually only a small slice of who we are? And what if that’s not even the most important part? In the r...

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Like Descartes, we view our bodies as (at best!) extraneous, temporary vehicles for trucking around our souls or “minds,” which are where all the real action takes place. In other words, we imagine hu...

Apathy is the acceptance of the unacceptable.

[Alienation is] “the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent.

Fiction does not ask us to believe things,” he points out, “but to imagine them.” “Imagining the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that it will be...

There are many who say to the Lord, "I give myself wholly to Thee, without any reserve," but there are few who embrace the practice of this abandonment, which consists in receiving with a ce...

“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.

Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth, and these are two kinds of generic givens of life, if you look at it poetically, biblically, the idea of the life of b...

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

A Story is life with the dull parts taken out.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

Because our consumption can take us anywhere, we are nowhere in particular.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

Why can’t our brains take something we intellectually know, something that seems easy, and process it into something we just get with our whole selves.