Creideamh

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The Lord enters into judgment
against the elders and leaders of his people:
“It is you who have ruined my vineyard;
the plunder from the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing my people
and grinding the faces of the poor?”
declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty.

—Isaiah 3:14-15

10th May 2012 | 1 note
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I settled into a memory of being maybe fourteen and passing by one of those then newly built NYU dormitories on First or Second Avenue, those multi-coloured blobs with some kind of chicken-wing-type modernity pointedly hanging off the roof, and there were these smartly dressed girls just being young out by the building’s lobby, and they smiled in tandem as I passed - not in jest, but because I was a normal-looking guy and it was a brilliant summer day, and we were all alive. I remember how happy I was (I decided to attend NYU on the spot), but how, after I had walked half a block away, I realized they were going to die and I was going to die and that the final result - nonexistence, erasure, none of this mattering in the “longest” of runs - would never appease me, never allow me to enjoy fully the happiness of the friends I suspected I would one day acquire, friends like these people in front of me.

—Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story, p. 235. 

7th May 2012 | 1 note
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Guess The Country

At the end of Talal Asad’s glorious Formations of the Secular he quotes Ron Shaham’s study or Egypt’s shari’a courts during the first half of the twentieth century:

The state’s leaders and legislators were reluctant … to create a split with tradition in this sensitive field of family law; they felt the society was not yet ready for more drastic change and that it was therefore preferable to introduce a modest reform in the framework of the existing legal system.

- Quoted in Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 253.

What is remarkable is that the description perfectly applies to Ireland and its governance in the second half of the twentieth century, replacing  Islamic authorities with Christian. 

Secularity, modernity, civilization, Christendom and Islam: these are concepts we really don’t know how to use…

1st May 2012
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… the mushrooming or “dum-dum” bullet, invented in British India in 1897, is reported to have been “so vicious, for it tore great holes in the flesh, that Europeans thought it too cruel to inflict upon one another, and used it only against Asians and Africans.

—Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 117

1st May 2012
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… This notion of sanity presupposes knowing the world practically and being known practically by it, a world of accumulating probabilities rather than constant certainties. It allows us to think of moral agency in terms of people’s habitual engagement with the world in which they live, so that one kind of moral insanity occurs precisely when the pain they know in this world is suddenly no longer an object of practical knowledge.

—Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 73.

30th Apr 2012
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The thought that the world needs to be redeemed is more than merely an idea. Since the eighteenth century it has animated a variety of intellectual and social projects within Christendom and beyond, in European global empires. In practice they have varied from country to country, unified only by the aspiration toward liberal modernity. But the similarity of these projects to the Christian idea of redemption should not, I submit, lead us to think of them as simple restatements of sacred myth, as projects that are only apparently secular but in reality religious.

—Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 61.

30th Apr 2012
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We do not understand the arrangements I have tried to describe if we begin with the common assumption that the essence of secularism is the protection of civil freedoms from the tyranny of religious discourse, that religious discourse seeks always to end discussion and secularism to create the conditions for its flourishing.

—Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 255.

29th Apr 2012
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In the eleventh century the college was entrusted with the duty of electing the new pope. The electoral meetings became known as “conclaves” (from *cum clave*, with a key) when, in the year 1271, in order to force them to make a choice after a delay of three years, the people locked them in their meeting place until they decided a candidate. The cardinals are still locked in for these prayerful deliberations in order to avoid any outside influences on their decision.

—James Cordien, An Introduction to Canon Law, p. 77.

25th Apr 2012
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The Roman Catholic bishop of Rome is probably the best known and most prestigious religious leader in the world. Within the church the pope speaks and acts with apparently unlimited authority. This style of papal activity gives the impression that the papacy is an absolute monarchy, that the Roman Catholic Church is headed by an elected king. Such a preception, while understandable, is seriously mistaken. The highest authority in the Roman Catholic Church is collegiate, not monarchical. The college of bishops, with the pope at its head, is the subject of supreme authority in the church.

—James A. Coriden, An Introduction to the Canon Law, p. 71. 

25th Apr 2012
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Therefore we declare, state, define and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.

—Papal bull Unam Sanctam, 1302.

24th Apr 2012 | 1 note