Sherry Chandler

Significant Snippets

Here follows a collection of unrelated statements that have somehow struck me as profound in my reading lately:

…Eliot’s The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s last and most profound book, Between the Acts, have in common (a fact more striking because they have nothing else in common) a sense of contrast between the course of a whole civilization and the tiny flashes of significant moments which reveal its meaning.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957)

I think maybe one mark of a genius, a poetic genius anyway, is to be able to recognize those tiny flashes.

The whole mark of fundamentalism is their absolute lack of self-reckoning.

— Rosie Jackson, “Between the Lines. Of Eros and Dust,” in Tears in the Fence, Autumn 2005

Our nation was founded on three pillars: a political theory of individual rights and civil liberties, an economic view of the beneficence of free markets, and a religious vision of souls that have been emancipated from the bondage of original sin.

This seems to be the text of a sermon given on March 5 by Galen Guengerich at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. I found it here.

A vile conceit in pompous words expressed
Is like a clown in regal purple dressed…

— from Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”

The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.

— Garry Wills in the NYTimes

And I’ll tell you what. Those apocryphal gospels, such as the much touted and “newly-discovered” Gospel of Judas, are even scarier. No time, I think, when we get really deep into religion of any kind, are we dealing with sweet little guardian angels.

Wills’s is a fine and widely-circulated essay on why politicians on either side cannot and should not invoke Christ. I’d recommend that you read it all.

Possibly related posts:

Dylan as false prophet???

Significant Finds

The Pope and Politics

Lazily Considering Genius

Was the Pope a Poet?

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