Christian Classics

The Image of God

“In the Old Testament the word of Jahveh is never a force of nature as in Assyria and Babylonia, but is always the fiction of a conscious and moral personality. This is related to the distin-ction in the image of God; the gods of the other Semitic peoples were originally perso-nified forces of nature. … […]

The Loss of Tradition

‘The undeniable loss of tradition in the modern world does not at all entail a loss of the past, for tradition and past are not the same, as the believers in tradition on one side and the believers in progress on the other would have us believe – whereby it makes little difference that the […]

A New Religiosity And Solidarity

“With Levinas, we dare call this “mutual responsibility” (EN 49/31) a “new spirituality” (AT 101/88): “the presence of per-sons in the full force of their irreplaceable identity, in the full force of their inevitable responsibility. To recognize and name the insoluble substances and keep them from exploding in violence, guile or politics, to keep watch […]

The Loss of the world

“But the world and the people who inhabit it are not the same. The world lies between peo-ple, and this in-between is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe. Even where the world is still halfway in order, or is kept half-way […]

Is Obsessive Hatred Be Diminished?

“What I am asking is this: Might the Chri-stian West and Islam live more humanely, more at ease with themselves, if the Jewish problem were indeed “resolved” (that endlosung or “final solution”)? Would the sun of obsessive hatred, of pain, in Europe, in the Middle East, to-morrow, it may be, in Argentina or South Africa, […]

Inspiration a state of possession

Nor will it do to invoke “inspiration” in order to justify want of answerability. Inspi-ration that ignores life and is itself ignored by life is not inspiration but a state of posse-ssion.” M. Bakthin

The Devil

“True and false, illusory and real, fan-tastic and everyday. Outside of us when we believe him to be in us, he is in us when we believe him outside of us. Although he leads an existence useless and parasitic, he is morally and resolutely ‘Mani-chean.’ He offers us a grimacing caricature of what is worst […]

Recover the Enemy

“The originality of Christ is not only love of neighbour, but peculiarly love of one’s enemy. The friend-enemy dialectic in Christian terms cannot be resolved by annihilating the enemy, but by re-covering the enemy as a friend. In the worldly order, this is not so; the enemy is liquidated. Either the State eliminates the enemy […]

Hindus call off rally through Christian villages in eastern India

Dayal among three awarded for promoting religious freedom, civil liberties