Monday, March 17, 2008

Notes and not-notes from a first class

(course title: Third World Issues)

"It is not easy to live faithfully in a world of ambiguities [, contradictions, and paradoxes]."

"Life is community: I am because we are, and we are because I am."

This December, for the first time in history, more people were living in cities than in the country.

It's now 8:19 We have a fifteen-minute break sometime, and we get out at 10:15. Huit heures dix-neuf. Dix heures et (le?) quart. Quarte? Le cours de français, je le trouve assez facile.

Discovering God in others and in their stories. Their stories becoming our stories. Our stories becoming their stories.

Matthew 25

There is only one explanation for the existence of poverty: selfishness, which is a manifestation of incomplete (?) love.

Merton: "We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God..."

Consuming more than we need is stealing from those in need.

Flannery O'Connor: "You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people's sufferings and not your own."

Mother Teresa: " We should not serve the poor like they are Jesus; we should serve the poor because they are Jesus."

You can be rich only when you can bear the sight of suffering.

Merton: "In the economy of divine charity, we have only as much as we give. But we are called upon to give as much as we have and more: as much as we are."

3 comments:

  1. :this december, for the first time in history, more people were living in cities than in the country:

    really? for the first time in history? I remember a talk I once heard, that the Bible started in a garden but ends in a city. It was a guy who was making a case for "urban Christianity," I think that's the name of the book he wrote. I am SUCH a city girl.

    (The guy who wrote the book is Ray Bakke--I just googled it and went off on a more than 17 minute detour...)

    I love the little French break in there...

    :)

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  2. Yep! That's what the prof said, anyhoo. *points at self* This one's a city girl, too.

    Seventeen minutes...heheh.

    French; yes, I just started this semester and it's rendered me a most joyful parrot. :D I have so much fun spitting out the simple sentences I can formulate...or even just numbers, as you see. Ha.

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  3. I don't think I could stand living in a truly rural place.

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