To Scobie the manifestation of even a human love is, by his own admission, merely a habit, a series of patterns, another trait which, like his pity and responsibility remains empty of positive content. Many if not most of his actions arise out of conformity to a pattern of behaviour: “life always repeated the same: there was always, sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered, pink gins to be consumed to keep misery away.” (191) Many of his religious practices were also merely routine: “It was the first Saturday of the month and he always went to Confession on that day.... the awful languor of routine fell on his spirits.”(152-53) It is not surprising, therefore, to discover the same languor of the empty, external habit seeping into a human …show more content…
This kind of disrelationship becomes explicit in Greene’s novel when Scobie begins to question God’s authority: “Why didn’t you let her drown?” (126) Later again Scobie chooses a woman instead of God: “God can wait, he thought: how can one love God at the expense of one of his creatures?” (187) Soon afterwards he experiences the result of his …show more content…
a stranger.” (223) God even becomes an “enemy” that one can “strike”; Scobie watches him “bleed”. (238) Repeating the image of the broken rosary, now lost, Greene seems to indicate that for Scobie who by his silence has caused the murder of Ali, the relationship with God has been severed: “Oh God, he thought, I’ve killed you at the end of them.” (247) Thus, Scobie alone performs the act of severance, he freely chooses to ignore the inner voice (of God); he decides to continue the disrelationship, and he finally, “turns his back on the altar.”
Without knowing, one could assume Greene’s “Wide-Awakeness and the Moral Life” and “The Art of Being Present” were written modern times. In fact, I thought they were recent articles. In a world that is constantly changing, there are few things that stay the same. And although sameness is the exact thing that these articles argue against, as educators we can use that sense of stalemate to continue to push ourselves and our students.
...such as extreme spiritual austerities can hold their place in history because they mattered to the people who practiced them, not necessarily because they were an agent for driving change. Bynum rejects morally absolutist reconstructions of the past in favour of a more relativistic reading which delves into the imagination and subconscious of the medieval writers themselves. She meets them, as much as possible, in their own milieu rather than projecting modern constructions (such as ‘anorexia nervosa’) into the past where they serve little use in our understanding of the medieval mind. Despite her close work with the Annalist School, Bynum makes no attempt toward ‘l’Histoire Totale’ or some grand narrative of the past, and in this regard the work is most honest, thought-provoking, and definitive for 21st century scholars studying the medieval mind and its times.
In the first chapter of God Behaving Badly, David Lamb argues that God is unfairly given a bad reputation. He claims these negative perceptions are fueled by pop culture and lead many to believe the lie that the God of the Old Testament is angry, sexist, racist, violent, legalistic, rigid, and distant. These negative perceptions, in turn, affect our faith. Ultimately, Lamb seeks to demonstrate that historical context disproves the presumptuous aforementioned. In addition, he defends his position by citing patterns of descriptions that characterize God throughout the Old Testament. “Our image of God will directly affect how we either pursue or avoid God. If we believe that the God of the Old Testament is really harsh, unfair and cruel, we won’t want anything to do with him” (Lamb 22). Clearly, they way Christians choose to see God will shape their relationship with Him.
to try to understand what sort of man Meursault is - a task that we
“To their religious performances were added the pleasures of wine and feasting, to allure a greater number of proselytes. When wine, lascivious discourse, night, and the intercourse of the sexes had extinguished every sentiment of modesty, then debaucheries of every kind began to be practiced, as every person found at hand that sort of enjoyment to which he was disposed by the passion predominant in his nature.”
“She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight,” (11). The novel, Their Eyes Were Watching, God by Zora Neale Hurston, tells a story of a woman, Janie Crawford’s quest to find her true identity that takes her on a journey and back in which she finally comes to learn who she is. These lessons of love and life that Janie comes to attain about herself are endowed from the relationships she has with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God , "The God that holds you over the
Rebecca Skloot’s novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, depicts the violation of medical ethics from the patient and researcher perspectives specifically when race, poverty, and lack of medical education are factors. The novel takes place in the southern United States in 1951. Henrietta Lacks is born in a poor rural town, Clover, but eventually moves to urban Turner Station. She was diagnosed and treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins hospital where cells was unknowingly taken from her and used for scientific research. Rebecca Skloot describes this when she writes, “But first—though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting sample or asked she wanted to be a donor—Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta's cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish” (33). The simple act of taking cells, which the physicians did not even think twice about, caused decades
Our ancient literature has always prescribed to have control over our internal desires – sexual, anger, jealousy, pride and wants. In spite of it been percolating for centuries to enlighten good, for its trueness, people willingly surrendered themselves fully to these by large.
"'Carpe Diem'('seize the day') is a Latin phrase which has come to denote an important literary motif especially common in lyric poetry: the encouragement to make the most of present life while it lasts, or to 'live for the moment," (The UVic Writer's Guide). Both Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle" explore the idea that people should attempt to live life to its fullest. Thomas's poem, written to his father, employs a very emotional, pleading style that deeply appeals to the audience, while Frost's poem, a series of thoughts about his own eventual death, exhibits a more pensive, practical, subtle style that craftily forces the audience to think of their own eventual demise. The themes of the two poems are similar in that both explain that death is impending, that people should not take for granted the time they have left on earth, and that people need courage to face death and to realize when death can wait. Thomas, however, strongly believes that people should take an active role in what happens to them during their lives as evident in his fervent, cogent tone, while Frost believes that each person has an appropriate time to die, and that people should try to accomplish their obligations before they let themselves give in to death's temptation.
Oftentimes, people reach a point in their lives when they realize that they need to think for themselves and take responsibility for becoming who they are cut out to be. Whether or not they actually become that person is questionable. In Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard argues that to become the "self" we must avoid despair and the influence of the world, and we must become what God wants us to be. In his essay, Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson promotes the idea of individualism and how we must rely upon only ourselves and God to establish and support ourselves. I will first explain Kierkegaard’s idea of what it is to become a “self” then I will show the many parallels between Sickness unto Death and Self-Reliance.
In E.E. Cummings poem “dying is fine) but Death”, the poet talks about the the ever discussed topic about dying and Death itself. Cummings talks about how dying is something to look forward to and how it is inevitable, from the moment we are born, to the fateful day it occurs. I agree with this analysis and the author’s analysis of the poem. Cummings uses his legendary shape style to form “dying is fine) but Death” to show how life begins. He may have wanted to symbolize the start of life with “o baby” which if you look at the paper version of the book, “o baby” is split up and very small compared to other sentences in the poem, signifying the start of someone’s life. When the middle of the poem starts to appear, the word “why?” pops up. This could signify the middle of someone’s life, or the “why” that many of us began to ask ourselves this question when we realize that not
ABSTRACT: According to Malebranche, Adam should be considered as an occasionalist philosopher. Not only did philosophy originate in paradise, but it in fact originated as Malebranchian occasionalism. It was in order to be able to persist in his occasionalist belief that Adam was given exceptional power over his body, that is, the power to detach the principal part of his brain (i.e., the seat of the soul) from the rest of the body. It was only in continually detaching the principal part of his brain from the rest of the body that Adam was able to persist in his occasionalist belief despite the unmistakable testimony of his sense to the contrary. Having once sinned, he thereupon lost his psychophysical privilege. Whereas pre-lapsarian physiology made Adam's belief in the causal efficacy of God possible, post-lapsarian physiology, in contrast, necessarily engenders and sustains belief in the causal efficacy of bodies. It was only as a result of the post-lapsarian physiology that some of the central problems of early modern philosophy arose. Contingent upon Adam's psychophysical privilege, occasionalism was possible only in paradise.
The Late Middle Ages saw great theological discrepancies through the progression of Christian mysticism. The exploration into spiritual practices and the unification of the soul during this period led to great philosophical works. The Cloud of Unknowing and The Imitation of Christ are two noteworthy texts that discuss one’s aspiration to attain union with God. The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymously authored spiritual exercise that accentuates movement toward the contemplative life by acknowledging what is unknown by man. In contrast, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis is a spiritual guide which emphasizes that the way to be fully Christian is to live in the imitation of Jesus Christ. While many of the thoughts concerning human reason and withdrawal from the corporal world are similar in the texts, the two are inherently different as the account in The Imitation of Christ is more compelling due to its focus on a humanistic objective while acquiring union and salvation with God.
“Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord.” (14.28) Love, in a present-day definition is normally a good thing. According to the brilliant St. Augustine, that would depend on the nature of the love in understanding. In his book, The City of God, Augustine skillfully drew upon two loves: on one hand, a love which is holy: agape, unselfish love, and on the other hand a love which is unholy: distorted love of self; selfishness. Augustine identifies with unselfish love, which is holy love, the love of God, and following God’s rules according to the bible. As contrasted to its opposite, love of self is to the point of contempt of God and neighbor in which these two loves conflict. In this essay, I will give a brief background of the author; I will be discussing the topic of love in The City of God, but more specifically, Augustine’s perception of self-love.