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the godforsaken blog is not forgotten
Try again. I was in a different place last year. It was a time when I felt I had to talk about the Sinophone women poets who were influential on the way I was thinking. It was necessary work, deep work, even, as I put them in conversation with Balthasar. I even had a whole…
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‘…whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use’: The Glory of the Lord, Seeing the Form, ‘The Light of Faith,’ 3.
It was magic. After finishing Bluets the second time through, I messaged a friend — in fact, another former student, another writer, who has given me permission to write about her work another day. Had she read Bluets? I asked. No, the reply came. ‘We were assigned The Argonauts.‘ The Argonauts, I told her, is…
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‘Suppose I were to begin by saying I had fallen in love with a color’: The Glory of the Lord, Seeing the Form, ‘The Light of Faith,’ 1-2.
I don’t feel like I read Balthasar very well today and may have to return to dwell on his words. For me, the term pistis and gnosis are familiar ones from my childhood, words I knew to denote faith and knowledge in the New Testament. I let these words wash over me, sometimes wondering whether…
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‘I am a Trappist like the trees’: The Glory of the Lord, Seeing the Form, Introduction, 5-7.
As the introduction to The Glory of the Lord winds to a close, Balthasar’s sweeping vision for revising how theology might be done through the ontological intervention of theological aesthetics comes together. Helpfully, he writes of its two dimensions toward the end: It comes at the end of what I can only describe as a…
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The Sinophone Milk Tea I needed: The Glory of the Lord, Seeing the Form, Introduction, 3-4
In sections 3 and 4 of the introduction to Seeing the Form, Balthasar takes on what he sees as the Protestant evisceration of theological aesthetics. He begins with Luther, moves through Schleiermacher, and ends up at Barth. There’s one author he says who bucks this trend, Gerhard Nebel, who in a way is writing in…
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‘Begin again’: The Glory of the Lord, Seeing the Form, Introduction, 1-2
As Balthasar opens, the problem announces itself. It is, as Edward Said also noted later on, the problem of the beginning. The first word a theologian starts with is ‘the truth of the growing kingdom of God both as it now is in the fulness of God’s creation and also in the weakness of the…
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‘Real godforsaken rain had not fallen in years’: The Glory of the Lord, Seeing the Form, ‘Foreword’
‘The overall scope of the present work,’ Hans Urs von Balthasar writes in the foreword of The Glory of the Lord, ‘naturally remains all too Mediterranean. The inclusion of other cultures, especially that of Asia, would have been important and fruitful.’ Confessing that his ignorance would have led to a ‘superficial presentation’ and ‘dilettanitism,’ he…
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godforsaken geographies 