Source
Subjects
From Alfred Lord Tennyson, Letter of Professor Tyndall", Memoirs of Alfred Lord Tennyson, quoted in James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, at 302:
From Alfred Lord Tennyson, Letter of Professor Tyndall", Memoirs of Alfred Lord Tennyson, quoted in James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, at 302:
From Alfred Lord Tennyson, Letter to Mr. B.P. Blood," Memoirs of Alfred Lord Tennyson quoted in James, The Varieties of Religious Experience at 302:
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I have never had any revelations through anesthetics, but a kind of waking trance – this for lack of a better word – I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words – where death was an almost laughable impossibility – the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?”
From Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1654):
Whatsoever we beg of God, let us also work for it.”
From Tacitus, Annales 15.44:
To suppress this rumor [that he himself had caused the burning of Rome in 64], Nero created scapegoats. He punished with exquisite cruelty the notoriously depraved group whom the populace called Christians.
The originator of the group, Christ, had been executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Yet, in spite of such a temporary setback, this pernicious superstition broke out again, not only in Judea, the origin of this mischief, but even in the City [Rome], whither all degraded and shameful practices collect from all over and become the vogue. First, Nero arrested self-acknowledged members of this sect. Then, on the information they supplied, large numbers were condemned, not so much for their arson as for their hatred of the human race. Their deaths were made a farce…so that despite their guilt and the ruthless punishment they deserved, there arose pity, for it was felt that they were being sacrificed to one man’s brutality rather than to the public interest.
From Igor Stravinsky, in R. Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, (1959):
Music is as well or better able to praise [God] than the building of the church and all its decorations: it is the Church’s greatest ornament. . . religious music without religion is almost always vulgar. RefMgr field[22]: 3
From Harry S. Stout Lectures, 1994: History of American Religion and Culture (January 25, 1994):
Rituals refer less to significant stories than to significant body language. As myths provide the significant narrative, so rituals provide the appropriate embodied response. Rituals are always actions, not thoughts. Long before there were religious thoughts there were religious actions. Long before there was doctrine there was ritual. Ritual actions integrate body, song, dance in regularly repeated actions designed to affirm the myths on the one hand and link yourself to the myth as an embodied responder on the other. Here is a myth, here is a significant story, here is an embodied response and by engaging in that embodied response, I am integrating myself into and connecting myself to that myth. Every religion can be understood in these terms. Rituals can be corporate. Or rituals can be individual.
From Harry S. Stout, The Experience of Grace: The Puritan Understanding," American Religious History Lectures:
1. A growing sense of conviction, awareness, awakening to the presence and power of sin.
2. An increasing need of a savior or aid in escaping the grasp of sin.
3. Repeated, abortive attempts to pull ourselves out of sin by our bootstraps: works righteousness.
4. Driven back in despair by the growing evidence of failure and futility.
5. Finally driven to existential awareness of the truth of justification by grace alone through faith.
6. First stage of true belief, first step on path as true pilgrim: admission to church membership.