Christ’s life is a demand. You don’t want to be reminded of it. So we don’t have to see what happens to the truth. A darker time is coming - when men will be more clever. They won’t fight the truth, they’ll just ignore it. I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo over his head. How can I show what I haven’t lived? Someday I might have the courage to venture, not yet. Someday I’ll - I’ll paint the true Christ.
— Ohlendorf, The Painter (A Hidden Life, 2019)
“The church confesses that it has coveted security, tranquility, peace, property, and honor to which it had no claim, and therefore has not bridled human covetousness, but promoted it.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
Have We Forgotten the Gospel Is Good News?
The negative ethic forbids certain actions; the positive ethic demands certain actions. To follow the negative ethic is to be decent, to have clean hands. But to follow the positive ethic, to be one’s brother’s keeper, is to be more than decent—it is to be active, even aggressive. If the negative ethic is one of decency, the positive one is the ethic of riskful, strenuous nobility.
Philip Hallie
A Philosophy of Love: Politics and the Role of the Church
The Virtue of Being Stubborn
Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved.
Synecdoche, New York (2008) Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman