Clayton tagged me with the Book
Meme Rules.
1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people
Well the nearest book is The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd and
the sentences read.
Carthusians and a famous Hall of St.
Mary
which was filled with
tapestries emblazoned with the Virgin’s heavenly splendour.
At the time of More’s visit the city was seized by a
particularly severe fit of Mariolotry , with a Franciscan monk
preaching
the
good news that whoever recited “psalterium beatae virginis” (by which
he meant the rosary) each day could never be damned.
It is pretty interesting that out of the
whole book which I really liked that this meme zeroed in on one series
of sentences that I didn’t quite agree with. This would be
considered Mariolotry if someone strictly believed that this
devotional
practice on its own outside of Christ would lead someone to be saved.
This should be seen as a bit a hyperbole in that everyone who
is faithful to praying the Rosary as a devotional practice likely will
be saved when there is a conformity of their prayer life to their
actions.
Well at least that is a bit more
interesting than what was in the second closest book to me “Cocoa
programming for Mac OS X.”
If anybody want to joint in to this meme
in the comment box, fire away.
29 comments
“Many languages need them [noun cases] to tell you who is doing what to whom. Approach them with a good attitude and you will feel the wisdom of Mark Twain’s little sermon, ‘Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. No one was there.'”
WOW! All I did was pick up “How to Learn Any Language” by Barry Farber, turned to p. 123, etc., and what do you know, found a great spiritual lesson for life!
The great thing about this little game–as with good poetry, as with the liturgical lectionary, as with so many things–is that a STRUCTURE, far from being an inhibiting thing, OPENS UP space for the Holy Spirit to work!
Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, “You have seen all the Lord did in the land of Egypt before your very eyes to Pharaoh and all his servants and all his lands; the greatest testings your own eyes have seen, and those great signs and wonders. But not even at the present day has the Lord yet given you a mind to understand, or eyes to see, or ears to hear. I led you for forty years in the desert.”
From The Liturgy of the Hours III quoting from the book of Deuteronomy 29:1-5, 9-28
Since I pray Morning and Evening prayer along with the podcast Pray Station Portable, it is within reach of my computer. The Podcast is available at http://www.sqpn.com
“Don’t shoot him.”
The closest book at hand is actually a Dr. Seuss compendium, and that’s from Horton Hatches the Egg. You probably wanted something with more meat to it, though, so here’s page 123 of Scott Hahn’s “Lord Have Mercy”:
“We become addicted to them.” Speaking of the delights of this world.
The Treasury of Catholic Wisdom by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.:
When I was deliberating about serving the Lord my God, as I had long meant to do, it was I who willed to do it, I who was unwilling. It was I. I did not wholly will, I was not wholly unwilling.
~ St. Augustine of Hippo
(Personally, I was amazed to see what is possibly the shortest sentenced ever composed by St. Augustine: “It was I.”)
Well it was either the Catechism or Catholicism for Dummies for I opted for the later.
“All requests for laicization must go to Rome, and only the Vatican can approve them. A defrocked or laicized cleric isn’t given a salary or housing or insurance. He an marry, but he can never celebrate any of the sacraments publicly.”
Feuerbach had articulated a program that Marx could embrace unreservedly, one that called for the conversion of ‘the friends of God into the friends of man, believers into thinkers, worshippers into workers, candidates for the other world into students of this world, Christians, who are on their own confession half-animal and half angel, into men—whole men.’ This notion of alienation, which Feuerbach derived from Georg Hegel, provided Marx with additional uses. Marx observed the dehumanizing
role of alienation also played in the workplace.
pg 123 “Architects of the Culture of Death” by Donald DE Marco & Benjamin Wiker. Chapter on Karl Marx. Ignatius Press.
The meme would have been significantly better if it had asked for the first full paragraph beginning on page 123. First, it would have saved me the annoyance of having to count sentences. Have you ever tried hunting for a period at 11:30 at night? It ain’t easy. Second, as a book lover, it would have given me a bit more to judge the worth of a book.
Anyway, here, according to the criteria, is what is written in THOMIST REALISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF KNOWLEDGE, by Etienne Gilson:
“One might say, for example, that an infant begins with a vague notion that its sensations or perceptions grasp really existing objects. Later on, thanks to the spontaneous application of the first principals and by comparing the different contents of perception, it becomes possible to apply the abstract notion of existence to certain perceptions. This extension is carried out so spontaneously that it soon goes beyond perceptions and embraces simple images also, thus giving rise to sense illusions, dreams and hallucinations.”
Makes you just want to run out and buy it, huh?
“All such agreements, though, need to be modified to reflect the particular allocation of responsibilities between editor and contributors. Alternatively, in appropriate circumstances, publishers can use simpler forms (such as that in fig. 4.3), closer in style to journal author forms (see fig. 4.2). Finally, it is possible to use work-made-for-hire agreements for all these persons, although that is the least common solution.”
-The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed.
Had a go already myself on the recent Newman book..
“That is why your religion would never do for me, Marcias. If I ever found a teacher it would have to be one who called little children to him.”
“That, alas, is not the spirit of the time.”
Helena by Evelyn Waugh
(What a wonderful book, by the way!)
Let me tell you one vairy funny story about putting. It was one day I play at Nijni-Novgorod with the pro against Lenin and Trotsky, and Trotsky had a two-inch putt for the hole. But, just as he addresses the ball, someone in the crowd he tries to assassinate Lenin with a rewolwer – you know that is our great national sport, trying to assassinate Lenin with rewolwers – and the bang puts Trotsky off his stroke and he goes five yards past the hole, and then Lenin, who is rather shaken, you understand, he misses again himself, and we win the hole and match and I clean up three hundred and ninety-six thousand roubles, or fifteen shillings in your money.
The bus and taxi stops were deserted. The snow made the city seem more deslolate than ever, the lamps were dimmer and he saw none of the normal night-time activities that made the city what it was; with its closed doors and empty pavements, it looked like the empty set for a medieval city. The snow covering the warehouses, the hastily built shanties, and the domes of the mosques was not white but blue.
Orhan Pamuk: The Black Book
That which magic rules, magic destroys. It would destroy you, too. You know it. Ha. Ha.”
Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters
On the other side of the glass, Hagrid was standing with his back to them, looking up and down the street.
“Get under here, quick,” said Harry, pulling his invisibility cloak out of his bag.”
“Oh — I don’t know, Harry,” said Hermione, looking uncertainly toward Mrs. Weasley.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The kind thought constitutes the most precious element of even the greatest works of charity. Thoughts are forces; they are the great sources of power. Even the mighty words and works of love of God Himself- the word by which He called the world into being and created a soul to share His own bliss, the tremendous wor of the Incarnation and the death of His own Son upon a Cross- are to be traced to the kindly thought of a loving heart.
The Hidden Pwer of Kindness by Lawrence G. Lovasik
“Several writers, not realizing sufficiently that there was no comparison between the circumstances of the two cases, applied to the elect of the New Testament arguments that it was customary to employ with regard to the saints of the Old. Of course, they did not deny the life of grace to these latter as some theologians did later. In accordance with the belief held by the Church from the very beginning, St. Augustine time and again makes a distinction between man in vetere testamento and man de vetere testamento; and he compares the righteous born before Christ to Jacobs hand issuing from his mothers womb before his head; in this he was followed by St. Gregory the Great, who refused to reject extra mysterium those who were born ante tempus.”
Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
-Henri de Lubac
I’m reading this one for one of my Theology courses, which is on Ressourcement. Great class, great book.
For it is better, if such is the will of God,
that we should suffer for doing good than for
doing evil. For Christ, too, once died for our
sins, the just for the unjust, that He might
offer us to God as men dead indeed in the flesh,
but brought to life in the spirit.
But the end of all things will draw near.
The Sadness of Christ, ch. “Scriptural Quotes and Reflections”,St.Thomas More, citing 1 Pt.
+JMJ+
****First of all, Richard, what book was your quote about Trotsky playing golf from???
*****Secondly:
“I’ve got heart trouble too, Beanly thought wryly, because of the same pushy blonde number. And on top of that I’m supposed to urge and inspire her to start in at Harkness.
It was after five when Beany reached home.
–Make a Wish for Me by Lenora Mattingly Weber
Chance or the Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism by Thomas Howard:
A boy may not approach his mother with the sexual rite in mind any more than a husband may try to make his wife over into a mother figure. Both attempts are confusion. Appropriateness is the test, and no merely scientific analysis of the situation will tell us why this body may not cohabit with this one.
Ok, so this seems pretty weird. Sure. But, it makes sense, right?
This is a great little book that I highly suggest to everyone. His main premise is the old myth (everything means everything) that has been replaced by the new myth (everything means nothing) is actually better than its shoddy replacement because it is true i.e. it reveals reality as it really is. Meaning is reality and the book takes you in a joyous and commonsensical voyage in the reality of the ordinary.
These sentences are taken from the chapter, Sex and he was obviously addressing the disordered reality of incest. Howard proposes that the sexual drama of human history (with all of its taboos) is actually rooted in how things really are i.e. truth and not merely taste. Union yearned by a person can only be fulfilled with the knowledge (sex as radically revelatory to ones personhood) of the other who is wholly different (male/female) and yet with the other which is also itself (human). He suggests that the traditional condemnation in cultures of the appropriateness of masturbation, homosexuality, incest, bestiality, etc. is founded upon this reality and recognition of union.
This book will have you taking delight in the truth of the ordinary world as you reevaluate the extraordinary reality imbued in it. Thomas Howard is a poet-philosopher and with every other page, he will have you laughing out loud about reality.
Well, this is what you get when I have just finished my undergraduate thesis. From “Topics in Algebra” by I.N. Herstein:
Its elements are of the form (summation of a sub i 1 to n times x sub 1 to the i-1, times x sub 2 etc to n), where equality and addition are defined coefficient-wise and where multiplication is defined by use of the distributive law and the rule of exponsents (x sub 1 etc. squared equals x sub 1 with the exponents addes times x sub 2, etc to n). Of particular importance is the case in which R = F is a field; here we obtain the ring of polynomials in n-variables over a field.
Of interest to us will be the influence of the structure of R on that of R[x sub 1 to n].”
Kudos to anyone who can figure that out, especially out of context and without an equation editor 🙂
P.G. Wodehouse’s Life With Jeeves.
(“I’m a good girl,” she said.)
“I bet you are. I hope you’re a good egg-and-spoon racer too.”
“Harold’s a bad boy.”
In my breviary, the three sentences are from Deuteronomy 29, and they go on for half a page! I never realized how long those sentences are. They begin: “But it is not with you alone that I am making this covenant, under this sanction of a curse; it is just as much with those who are not here among us today as it is with those of us who are now here present before the Lord, our God.”
The next two sentences are even longer, so I’ll stop with the first one. This is from the Office of Readings, first reading for Wednesday of the third week in Ordinary Time.
Uh-oh. I just tagged you, too.
Do you have another book close to you?
Karen,
I always have books close to me, but to select from a non-programmer book – Lourdes Font of Faith, Hope, and Charity by Elizabeth Ficocelli.
He was selected as one of six parishioners in London to make the pilgrimage due to his condition of being paraplegic, or “spastic,” from birth. It was his first experience being away from home. As John recalls the first miracle he experienced from Lourdes was his own self-revelation. “When you are born sick you are of the opinion that you are the only sick person in the world. In Lourdes my eyes were open.
“And this was the workmanship of the lampstand, hammered work of gold; form its base to its flowers , it was hammered work; according to the pattern which the LORD had shown Moses, so he made the lampstand. And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Take the Levites from among the people of Isrel…”
The Bible (RSV-Catholic edition)
“Dante did not mention the ship in Acheron either.”
“Ship?”
“Yes, Allen, a wooden sailing ship sunken on the other side of Acheron. The decks are just awash with blood.”
From Niven & Pournelle’s book Inferno
Kathy,
I was thinking that the disqualifying variables (not enough pages, page 123 doesn’t have 5 sentences on it, etc)made this game safely not divination. 🙂
So it took me 3 books to get to the book that serves as my mousepad, and in it I landed on Scripture, anyhow, which is always relevant. Whew. No tea leaves here.
The book nearest to me is “Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics” – Meriam & Kraige, Third Edition.
“An airplane or rocket in flight and an electron moving in a charged field are examples of unconstrained motion. The second type is constrained motion where the path of the particle is partially or totally determined by restraining guidelines. An ice hockey puck moves with the partial constraint of the ice.”
“The water was up to about chest-high and we had no way to get out so everybody was up and about seeing what they could do. I was taking Julie-Mae off the bed and holding her until they could move the bed from spot to spot to set her on it to keep her from the water.
Mr.Denny: The house was full of water up to our necks.”
(Hurricane Ivan Survival Stories-Cayman Islands by Terri Merren) table book in the livingroom