it occurs to me
October 5th, 2009…that this is, even as its name roughly suggests, something of a musical and thematic bookend to the Western tradition since the Renaissance:
(though my more musically precise friends can feel free to correct me)
we mark up the back of the envelope; the letter addresses us
…that this is, even as its name roughly suggests, something of a musical and thematic bookend to the Western tradition since the Renaissance:
(though my more musically precise friends can feel free to correct me)
…and liked it. I’m very grateful! This was awarded the Kent Keeth Poetry Prize (a student literature contest award) at the 2009 Beall Poetry Festival at Baylor University:
Disclosure If someone should speak Peace it will not be The silencing of voices all resolved, in pacification, Nor the pacific strain—stout Cortez or Balboa to the side, see the scene Of conflict, wide and warm, like blood, and salty— It will not be with pax Or pace—non requiescat, lest we lie To rest, in cooling stillness, like the tomb— Such pieces from the pavement form the stones We throw, the gore we touch, the road to all for your own good and we mean well— No, If someone should speak peace, the word will be Some word I’ve left unspoken, unforeseen, foretold a revelation.
Hard to argue with this, really:
If, robbed of two fond old enormities,
Our being had no onward auguries,
What then were this great love of ours to say
For launching other lives to voyage again
A little farther into time and pain,
A little faster in a futile chase
For a kingdom and a power and a Race
That would have still in sight
A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?
Is this the music of the toys we shake
So loud,—as if there might be no mistake
Somewhere in our indomitable will?
Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because our brains and bones and cartilage
Will have it so?
If this we say, then let us all be still
About our share in it, and live and die
More quietly thereby.
(E. A. Robinson, “The Man Against the Sky“)
…and, of course, for the title reference, take a Journey to the music video world.
I believe that Jesus Christ, whose dead body was entombed, sealed, placed under guard, and left undisturbed until the morning after the Sabbath (on the third day in which he had been dead), did not remain dead. Like those whom Christ and the prophets had called back from death throughout Biblical history, Jesus rose from the dead: the normal biological function of the body to which His mother had given birth began again, despite the fatal wounds whose marks were still plain on his body. Unlike those whom Christ and the prophets had called back from the dead, however, Christ not only came back to bodily life but has been transformed (as all Christ’s people one day will be), so that His body is now insusceptible of death from natural or violent causes, and bears without mortal flaw the image of God.
All knowing is adversely affected by the fall, yet people can—under the right conditions—attain reasonable beliefs on the things that matter most.
(Doug Groothuis, “The Christian Worldview in Classical Philosophical Categories“)
True enough. But “the right conditions” remain critical, and open to interpretation in lieu of an eschatological realization: crucial, a crux not merely of interpretation.
I believe that Jesus Christ willingly went to death for my sake, and that of other believers; that his death was unjustly ordered by collusion of the Roman Pontius Pilate, the Jewish Sanhedrin, and the Hellenic collaborator King Herod; that he was publicly executed by crucifixion, known to be dead by friend and foe, and buried with official notice and under guard.
(Comment Me No Comments: YouTube – Johnny Cash Hurt)
OK, so there’s something reflexive about this. At my other blog, I posted for those interested in watching the videos.
This is theory, or something like it.
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