Joel Cipriano

It wasn’t the first time I felt that way, nor the last, but that energy was what I had been looking for. Leaping into risk and hoping for the worst would become a mantra for me during those bright nights. And sometimes, the worst arrived.

– Benjamin Roberts

What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity.

— Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

Design should not dominate people, it should help people.

– Dieter Rams

Ships sink not because of the water that surrounds them, but because of the water that gets into them.

Don’t let what surrounds you fill your soul and drag you to the bottom.

– Patriarch Paul of Serbia

But just being set in order, just being a certain thing, isn’t your identity. Your identity includes and is dependent on that web of relationships we were talking about; the way we fit into the rest of creation, including our fellow humans, but going beyond our fellow humans to all of the rest of creation; having that set of relationships, those connections, being right, being set right, being put in order and in their proper order. Without that, we can’t be internally set right. This is why, all through the Scriptures—famously in 1 John, but all through the Scriptures—you can’t love God and hate your neighbor. You can’t have things right with God, you can’t be justified and have things be out of whack at the same time. I don’t want to pick on him too much, but I’m sorry, Martin Luther. You can’t be just and a sinner at the same time. You just can’t.

So we have to always remember, and especially now during Great Lent, when we’re really focused on this—we’re focused on repentance—that this is not just a move inward. Everything that we said about paradise being within you and the kingdom being within you is absolutely true, but that doesn’t mean that you fold in on yourself and become a solipsist and become entirely self-focused, because finding yourself and finding what is within you is only going to happen through correcting that web of relationships. You’re going to find yourself in other people; you’re going to find God in other people.

And when we’re loving our neighbor and we’re setting things right and we’re making amends as part of our repentance and we’re putting everything around us back into order, that’s what’s going to cause all those things within us that are out of joint and out of place to slide back into place. That’s where things are going to come together, and we’re going to find out who we really are and what it really means to be a human, and thereby, by discovering what it means to really be human, to discover what it is to be like Christ and to become like God, which is what we call theosis and what salvation is really all about. It’s about becoming a son of God, as we’ve said before, becoming like him, becoming like Christ. That doesn’t happen for us all alone on our own. That happens for us as part of the Church, as part of a community of the faithful, both those who are alive with us here in this world now and those who have gone before. We all find salvation and restoration and paradise together.

– Fr. Stephen De Young

But what this means is that wherever God’s paradise is, wherever the dwelling-place of God is, that place is going to be under siege by the enemies of God, by the spiritual enemies of God. That includes within us. This is part of the basis of our understanding of spiritual warfare. If the Holy Spirit is dwelling within us and we’re the temple of God and we’re the dwelling-place of God, then we become paradise within and the mountain of God within. Then that means there’s going to be a siege; we’re going to be under attack by God’s enemies. So this forms an important base, deeply connected to our understanding of spiritual warfare. The mountain of God is not some physical mountains, but it’s inside you. It’s part of your internal geography.

– Fr. Stephen De Young

If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of military conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow.

The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s real relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life.

To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.

They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature, they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

– William James

Enduring software companies are generally designed to feel like boring utilities. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Superhuman: they sacrifice character so that the user can fill the vessel with their own soul!

– Scott Stevenson

Visiting a cilliní will show you, better than any university research paper, why this is the case. The Roman Catholic church is unique in the Christian world in having believed in both Limbo and Purgatory, two notions unknown in the early Church and unreferenced in the Bible, and the notion that all humans automatically inherit grievous personal sin at birth was drummed into Catholics here and elsewhere. It explains, if you ask me, the sense of darkness that can sometimes permeate the historic Irish Church, especially in the period after the Reformation. I’m no theologian, but I can’t see how the God of the Gospels could have any truck with Christian mothers weeping as their dead babies are buried at night in unmarked graves.

– Paul Kingsnorth

Politics is often just sublimated religion.

– Paul Kingsnorth

The constant message from the outside world was: “Life is elsewhere.”

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If AI compa­nies are allowed to market AI systems that are essen­tially black boxes, they could become the ulti­mate ends-justify-the-means devices. Before too long, we will not dele­gate deci­sions to AI systems because they perform better. Rather, we will dele­gate deci­sions to AI systems because they can get away with every­thing that we can’t. You’ve heard of money laun­dering? This is human-behavior laun­dering. At last — plau­sible deni­a­bility for every­thing.

– Matthew Butterick

A lot of times our Western Christian friends present salvation as: Well, God has these laws, we’ve broken those laws, so he’s angry at us or he’s compelled by his attribute of justice—he has to punish those violations of the Law—so Christ comes to save us from that; so God has to save us from himself or save us from one of his attributes, save us from his own justice. But that’s not what the Scriptures say; the Scriptures say that Christ came to save us from our sins, because our sins are destroying us, our sins are turning us into this demonic monsters if we keep going down that path.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we are making it in our own image… But the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity.

– Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents