Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read
A batch of the best highlights from what Joshua's read, .
The first word, psychikos, does not in any case mean anything like “physical” in our sense. For Greek speakers of Paul’s day, the psychē, from which the word derives, means the soul, not the body. But the deeper, underlying point is that adjectives of this type, Greek adjectives ending in-ikos, describe not the material out of which things are made but the power or energy that animates them. It is the difference between asking, on the one hand, “Is this a wooden ship or an iron ship?” (the material from which it is made) and asking, on the other, “Is this a steamship or a sailing ship?” (the energy that powers it). Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psychē (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God’s pneuma, God’s breath of new life, the energizing power of God’s new creation.
Surprised by Hope
N. T. Wright
Notice how similar the definition of liturgy is to the definition of habit. They’re both something repeated over and over, which forms you; the only difference is that a liturgy admits that it’s an act of worship. Calling habits liturgies may seem odd, but we need language to emphasize the non-neutrality of our day-to-day routines.
The Common Rule
Justin Whitmel Earley
All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger. (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature [New York: Harvest, 2002], 56)
Desiring the Kingdom
James K. A. Smith
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