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It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.
-Marilynne Robinson
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It's A Difficult Thing To Describe Theology,

Marilynne Robinson
It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.
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Mean Reality Thinking

More From Marilynne Robinson

Often, when i want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what i actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. it is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. that's theology.
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As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. no reality fits an ideology. life is beyond that. that is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. but life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made . meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning.
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The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.
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As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. we never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. it is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. the childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.
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I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. these abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well.
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The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo. we need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also. my life is full of meaning to me. the life around me must be full of significance to it. if i want others to respect my life, then i must respect the other life i see however strange it may be to mine. ethics in our western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relation of man to man... but that is a limited ethics.
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