Sublime

Gabriel Marcel, a Christian among the existentialists, appreciated our road-hunger. Marcel described humanity as homo viator, “itinerate man.” But he was staunchly critical of Sartre’s view of freedom. Freedom isn’t digging a tunnel to escape, he counseled; it’s digging down into yourself.

Jesus binds his being to Paul’s through the experience of death (the cross), just as Jesus binds himself to the church through the death experience of persecution. This is a truly ontological reality for Paul, because Paul’s own being (the very story that gave coherence to his being) was dead and yet was now made alive by being hidden in the resurr

The process of knowing takes place under the guidance of analogy, and in these circumstances is always recognition. If likeness is taken in the strict sense, knowing is a matter of anamnesis within a closed circle. If it is extended to similarities in what differs, the process of knowing can become an open circle of learning, in which new apprehens

They will know us, not because we are heroes and power brokers, but much the opposite: they will know us because we are in the world as ministers, entering the death experiences of persons as the transcendent experience of love. Even against the pull of Secular 3 and the closed spin of the immanent frame, the age of authenticity leads to the strong

King was drawing from the wisdom of the biblical texts and the practice of Gandhi, claiming that persons were more than just material and natural realities but were bearers of inherent worth as those who encounter and seek transcendence.

And ministry is never absent a spirit of fullness that takes our being into otherness and mystery. Pointing to this sense of ministry, John Zizioulas says powerfully, “Faith is thus an attitude of gratitude to every Other and of doxology to the Other par excellence, the author of all otherness. This kind of faith offers no security of rational conv

And Menahem, who at twenty-five had been driven to consider truth for himself, threw back what would become the timeless answer of the Christian: “God intended salvation to be within the reach of anyone: even me.