I Think The Attempt To Defend Belief

I Think The Connection Between Poetry And Theology, Which Is Profound In Western Tradition - There Is A Great Deal Of Wonderful Religious Poetry - Both Poetry And Theology Push Conventional Definitions And Explore Perceptions That Might Be Ignored Or Passed Off As Conventional, But When They Are Pressed Yield Much Larger Meanings, Seem To Be Part Of A Much Larger System Of Reality.

A Sermon Is A Form That Yields A Certain Kind Of Meaning In The Same Way That, Say, A Sonnet Is A Form That Deals With A Certain Kind Of Meaning That Has To Do With Putting Things In Relation To Each Other, Allowing For The Fact Of Complexity Reversal, Such Things. Sermons Are, At Their Best, Excursions Into Difficulty That Are Addressed To People Who Come There In Order To Hear That.

The Assumption Behind Any Theology That I've Ever Been Familiar With Is That There Is A Profound Beauty In Being, Simply In Itself. Poetry, At Least Traditionally, Has Been An Educing Of The Beauty Of Language, The Beauty Of Experience, The Beauty Of The Working Of The Mind, And So On. The Pastor Does, Indeed, Appreciate It.

The Idea That The Universe Itself Is Physically Structured Around Hierarchy Was Sort Of An Integration Of Earlier Science And Theology That Was Made By People Like Thomas Aquinas, That Was Assumed Doctrinally In That Tradition. The Reformation Rejected That Model Of Reality And Created A Highly Individualistic Metaphysics In The Sense That It Located Everything Normative That Can Be Said About Reality In Human Perception, There Being, Of Course, No Other Avenue Of Knowing. There Is Scripture, There Is Conscience, There Is Perception Itself.

It's Not A Man's Working Hours That Is Important, It Is How He Spends His Leisure Time.