№ 787. A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Calvin & Hobbes

A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Karen Armstrong is a comprehensive exploration of how the concept of God has evolved across three major monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Below, is the outline of the thesis, a detailed summary, and strategic insights based on the key arguments and themes Armstrong develops in the book.

Thesis of the Book

The central thesis of A History of God is that the concept of God has evolved over time in response to changing cultural, historical, and social contexts. Armstrong argues that the image of God is not static, but rather, it is continuously reinterpreted and shaped by human experience, philosophical development, and theological reflection. Throughout history, each of the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—has wrestled with the nature of God, and these struggles have influenced not only religious thought but also broader societal structures, political ideologies, and personal identities.

Armstrong proposes that religion, especially in these three traditions, often becomes more about human attempts to understand the divine and its relationship to humanity, rather than a purely objective revelation. The quest for understanding God, according to Armstrong, is a deeply human endeavor marked by constant tension between faith, reason, and experience.

№ 767. The Salt Doll

Screenrant

A salt doll journeyed for thousands of miles over land until it finally came to the sea. 

It was fascinated by this strange, moving mass quite unlike anything it had ever seen before. 

‘Who are you?’ the Salt Doll asked the sea. 

The sea smilingly replied, ‘Come in and see.’ 

So the doll waded in. The farther it walked into the sea, the more it dissolved until there was only very little of it left.

Before that last bit dissolved, the doll exclaimed in wonder, ‘Now I know what I am!’”

№ 701. Advent

The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist (Bruegel)

Each year, in our Advent prayer, we give voice to our longing for the coming realm of the messiah when our present world's pains — war, poverty, hunger, climate change, violence, inequalities — will be no more. Even if we say we realize that our longing can never be fulfilled in this life, it still arises, again and again, from a deep and persistent place in our human hearts. In fact, I believe that many of the fissures in today’s society stem from groups of people who mistakenly think that joining this or that movement, following this or that leader, or destroying this or that enemy will bring about the perfect world. And the more the world's ills increase, the more people are tempted to join these groups.

How to break the cycle? One way, obviously, is to work to lessen the ills that feed it. We can feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, live sustainably, and fight racism, sexism and all the other -isms. But that will never be enough; there will always be more that needs to be done. Sometimes it seems that, as with Alice in Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass, we need to run as hard as we can to stay in the same place. To get anywhere, as the Red Queen said, we would need to run twice as fast.

The second way, paradoxically, may be to embrace our human world as Jesus embraced it — not to stop feeding the hungry or healing the sick, but to realize that it is precisely in this world of the poor, the sick, the hungry, the displaced and homeless where God is to be found. Maybe if we actually managed to create a perfect world — or, in the terms of science fiction, to discover a perfect universe somewhere else in the multiverse — God wouldn't be there. In fact, I sometimes wonder if maybe even Heaven isn't "painless." Maybe, as St. Thérèse of Lisieux said, we are supposed to be spending Heaven "doing good on earth" — still sharing in and helping to ameliorate the pains that bedevil earth's people even after we have left it. For me personally, the thought of an eternity of perfect peacefulness is sometimes a little frightening. I would want to "help God" in some way. I need to pray about this.

№ 692. Trust in the Process

Cracked

“You can have flaws, be anxious and even be angry, but just remember that your life is the world’s biggest enterprise. Only you can stop it from failing. You are appreciated, admired, and loved by so many. 

 

Remember that happiness is not having a sky without storms, a road without accidents, a job without effort, a relationship without disappointments.

 

№ 646. What does it mean to discern?

Berean Research

№ 634. Robert Fulghum

Searching for Laugh

Fulghum, a voracious reader, is the first to admit that ''Kindergarten'' is not great literature. Some of it, he freely admits, is the ''worst kind of heart-rending daddy drivel imaginable,'' the literary equivalent of happy-face buttons - cheery conversational revelries on such diverse subjects as hide-and-seek, spider webs, Crayola crayons, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Ty Cobb's batting average. Not without charm, the essays seem to appeal to the same instinct that makes the proprietor of a 24-hour grille in Moab decorate the walls of her restaurant with perky sayings like ''Square meals make round people'' and ''Is there life before coffee?''

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, whose own book of reflective essays, ''When Bad Things Happen to Good People,'' was also a phenomenal best seller, believes that Fulghum's popularity can be explained thus: ''In a world of complex ethical decisions, he cuts through the details and says 'at the heart are a few simple rules. You can be a moral person; it's not as complicated as it seems.' ''

FULGHUM'S ESSAYS REAFFIRM THE SANCTITY OF THE ordinary. He does not preach, and rarely mentions God, but his book has a strong spiritual component. He focuses on the transcendental stuff of everyday life - shoe repair men, raking leaves and emptying the sink strainer. Not quite preacher, not quite regional humorist, he is a hybrid folk fabulist - a sort of Norman Vincent Bombeck.

 

The Ohio State University

 

OUTSIDE THE Edmonds Unitarian Church, in Seattle, where Fulghum served as part-time minister from 1966 until 1985, is a stretch of lawn littered with hundreds of dandelions. The congregation dedicated this patch of ground in Fulghum's honor upon his retirement in 1985, at 48. ''I was speechless beyond belief,'' he said one afternoon at the church. ''It said they heard me. I take this ground very seriously.''

More than anything else, it is Robert Fulghum's years as a minister and teacher that give his stories resonance. ''Being human and alive is a pretty lonely deal,'' he said, ''no matter how intimate or lovely your relationships are.''

His perspectives on the commonality of human experience have been gleaned from hundreds of weddings, funerals, hospital rooms and mortuaries. All that birth, death, and renewal makes for prime storytelling fodder. Distributing someone's remains from 2,000 feet over Bellingham Bay, Wash., in a Cessna, Fulghum had the ashes fly back in his face. ''How do you brush off those ashes?'' he asks with mock seriousness. ''Do you go like this?'' (polite dusting gestures) ''Or like this?'' (frantic pawing).

 

Cartoonist Group

 

№ 565. On Religion

Cartoonist Group

 

№ 538. Journey through the Looking Glass

 

Modernist Controversy

Writing in his (Albert Camus) notebook in 1942, he observed: “Calypso offers Ulysses a choice between immortality and the land of his birth. He rejects immortality. Therein lies perhaps the whole meaning of the Odyssey.” In Camus’ reading, Homer teaches us to embrace a life of limits, a life in which we are not yearning for either immortality or the afterlife. Our love for this earth is necessarily brief, and death is the price of admission, the final limit. Camus could not believe in God because to do so, as he put it in “Summer in Algiers,” is to “sin against life” by hoping for another, thus “evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.”

 

№ 508. The Paradoxes of Enclosure

At a time when the rule of life across the globe has been disrupted by the paradoxes of collective isolation, a sensitivity to “the small,” to containment and enclosure, presses upon individuals, families, and society in unexpected and often confounding ways. Like Jones’s experimental letter forms, we awkwardly jostle for space within the confines of our homes, balconies, and gardens. Even communal spaces like parks and grocery stores seem to have shrunk, as attempts to heed social distancing alter our awareness of space. Our sense of what counts as crowded has changed, as we learn to accommodate these new rules. Meanwhile, many of us, particularly those in self-isolation, are simultaneously learning just how vastly vacant even a small space can feel.

We can recalibrate our senses to the mysteries of the small through meditation on that paradox of paradoxes, the Incarnation, with the help of this little wood block by David Jones. Throughout Jones’s work there is a marked affection for “things familiar and small.” It is inseparable from a spiritual practice of attention—tuning our senses to that which is easily overlooked or undervalued. Wrapped up in this sensitivity to the small is a care for the fragile, the vulnerable, and a discovery of the surprising resilience of the delicate. It is guided above all by the conviction that it is through refinement of our attention that the wonder and mystery of the created world, particularly in its relation to the divine, reveals itself most fully to us. Focusing on what is small and seemingly commonplace becomes a portal for seeing all things in light of the love of God and thus yields, paradoxically, the most generous and capacious of vantage points.

As the whole world fights to contain a contagion through the mantra “stay at home,” uniting and separating lives in various ways, our spiritual labor in this time may be to find these openings for grace within the multiple circles of our everyday circumstance as these widen and intersect with others, and in light of their relation to the divine Other. We are in truth, as Julian of Norwich reminds us, enclosed not by walls or government guidelines, but by the enduring intimacy of the love of God. For “he is our clothing that for love wrappeth us and windeth us, holdeth us and all becloseth us, hangeth about us for tender love that he may never leave us.”

Grand Mosque at Djenne, Mali

№ 474. When You Believe

[MIRIAM]

[Verse 1]
Many nights we've prayed
With no proof anyone could hear
In our hearts a hopeful song we barely understood
Now we are not afraid
Although we know there's much to fear
We were moving mountains long before we knew we could

[Chorus]
There can be miracles when you believe
Though hope is frail it's hard to kill
Who knows what miracles you can achieve
When you believe, somehow you will
You will when you believe

[TZIPPORAH]
[Verse 2]
In this time of fear when prayer so often proved in vain
Hope seemed like the summer birds
Too swiftly flown away
Yet now I'm standing here

[MIRIAM]
Now I'm standing here

№ 441. Listen, O Drop

"Listen, O drop, give yourself up without regret,
and in exchange gain the Ocean.

Listen, O drop, bestow upon yourself this honor,
and in the arms of the Sea be secure.

Who indeed should be so fortunate?
An Ocean wooing a drop!

In God's name, in God's name, sell and buy at once!
Give a drop, and take this Sea full of pearls.”

--- Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi (1207–1273)

№ 435. God of the Gaps

Someone asked the Master if he believed in luck.

"Certainly," he replied with a twinkle in his eye.

"How else can one explain the success of people one does not like?"

--- from Awakening, Conversations with the Master, by Anthony de Mello

№ 376. Theology after Carmina Burana

In this great fiat of the little girl Mary, the strength and foundation of our life of contemplation is grounded, for it means absolute trust in God, trust which will not set us free from suffering but will seift us free from anxiety, hesitation, and above all from the fear of suffering. Trust which makes us willing to be what God wants us to be, however great or however little that may prove. Trust which accepts God as illimitable Love.” ---- The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander

'The Reed of God' depicts the intimately human side of Mary, Mother of God, as an empty reed waiting for God's music to be played through her.

Bento Box:

A friend who belongs to a Catholic religious order posted the passage above.

I thought, it is such a beautiful love letter to God composed by a devotee.

№ 360. Ecclesiastes 3

This Sunday, I read once more, a reminder letter. A cousin just died. Last year, it was another cousin. Before that, my aunts. It's been a succession of passing.

Ecclesiastes 3 King James Version (KJV)

1  To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

9 What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?

10 I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.

11 He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

12 I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life.

13 And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.

14 I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.

15 That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.

16 And moreover I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there.

17 I said in mine heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work.

18 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.

19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

21 Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?

22 Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?

№ 347. Chasing Summers in the Depths of Winter

From one of the Daily Globe clippings:




At the former St. Thomas More chapel of Ateneo de Manila on Padre Faura, the celebrant was a Jesuit priest who had just finished his doctorate at Harvard University.

Christmas is when we celebrate the unexpected; it is the festival of surprise, Horacio de la Costa said in a seven-minute homily that has been quoted time and again.

№ 346. January: A New Hope

(A perennial favorite homily among Fr. James Donelan, S.J.'s faithful--a good read & inspiring thoughts on New Year)

IF you were to enter a home in ancient Rome, you would find in the doorway a dog with two heads. A statue, of course. It is Janus, the Roman god of the doorway. One head looked to the past, the other to the future. Since the first month of the year has this two-fold function, it acts as a bridge between past and future, the Romans called it January. It is a demanding month, a frightening month, perhaps more frightening than a birthday. It requires more than remembering to put the right year on our letters and our checks. It is a threshold, a passage, and every threshold makes us pause. Every passage leaves us different from the way we were.

№ 344. Christmas Carol

What's a cure for old age and death? For chaos? For pandora's bane?

When world peace is a sight unseen in a galaxy far, far away, when death and sickness come bearing down on our doorposts, what's the proper response?

The year 2017 will come to a close soon. Like in so many years before it, people will again hope for a better year, for a better world.

World peace will always be a cliche. Climate change may soon be a tired slogan on a fake campaign platform. Gender fairness is so 1990s as one writer admitted.

Humankind is a never ending craft.

№ 317. Gospel on Foot

№ 280. Thursday in the Desert

Oil Lamps at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum
Flagellation Monastery (Via Dolorosa)

“Those who saw so dimly could be further blinded by the light of full revelation. Jesus, therefore, does not reveal with complete clarity the true nature of the messianic kingdom which is unostentatious. Instead he filters the light through symbols, the resulting half-light is nevertheless a grace from God, an invitation to ask for something better and accept something greater.” Living Space

№ 273. Confession

Woody Quotes

I confess.
I tell him all things.
He nods, eyes closed.

A turn of phrase
Catches him.
He smiles, eyes still shut.

I ask for
Absolution
And penance.

He grants me
Neither.
He sends me off

To work on
Bach's Preludium
After Hanon.