Wisdom from the 42nd Page

The Art of Pilgrimage

On the forty-second page of “The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred” author Phil Cousineau wrote (some emphasis added):

The Sacred Call

Personal answers to ultimate questions.
That is what we seek.
—Alexander Eliot

All ancient pilgrimage not only celebrated identity," write Simon Colman and John Elsner in their book Pilgrimage, "but did so by linking it with a special place." The Great Panathenaea was an ancient procession that wove together the sacred and the secular as it wound up the Acropolis to the Parthenon, where a new robe was offered to the gold-and-ivory statue of Athena. If a spectator arrived at any other time, their circumambulation of the temple, according to the authors, "constituted a kind of proxy pilgrimage, a vicarious pilgrimage in a sacred event scheduled for a different time."

The Olympic Games were inagurated in 776 B.C.E in Olympia, Greece, in honor of the god Zeus. Thousands from all over the Mediterranean ventured there or to other events and sites such as the Pythian Games, the Isthmian games, the Nemean and Delphi, and were guaranteed safe passage by an unusual suspension of war during the games. Other sacred-center pilgrimages included Phocia, Dodona and Ammon in Libya.

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(Conari Press, April 2000. Paperback, 288 pages. ISBN: 1573245097; EAN: 9781573245098.)

Why I Believe

On the forty-second page of “Why I Believe” (a collection by various authors & contributors) Michael Ballam wrote (emphasis added):

Similarly Joseph Haydn, speaking of his oratorio The Creation said: "Not from me—it came from above.... I would quietly and confidently pray to God to grant me the talen that was needed to praise him worthily."³ Mozart, in a letter to his father Leopold, confided: "God is ever before my eyes" and "I prayed to God for His Mercy that all might go well, to His greater glory, and the symphony began."⁴

Johannes Brahms, in Arthur M. Abell's Talks with Great Composers, describes the source of his inspiration: "I immediately feel vibrations that thrill my whole being. These are the spirit illuminating the soul power within, and in this exalted state, I see clearly what is obscure in my ordinary moods. Then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above, as Beethoven did.... Straightway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind's eye but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies and orchestration. Measure by measure, the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare, inspired moods. The power from which all truly great composers like Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven drew their inspiration is the same power that enabled Jesus to work His miracles. It is the power that created our earth and the whole universe."⁵

It is no wonder that Latter-day Saints have been great supporters of symphony orchestras, oratorio societies, great choruses, and opera companies. Music and art help us understand beyond our normal capacity. The Apostle Paul commented on this phenomenon when he explained the teachings of the Spirit: "And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:7.)

3. Herbert F. Peyser, Joseph Haydn, Servant and Master (New York: Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York, 1950), p. 50.
4. Alfred Einstein, Mozart, the Man and the Artist Revealed in His Own Words (New York: Dover Publications, 1965), p. 95.
5. Arthur M. Abell, Talks with Great Composers (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), p. 5.

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(Bookcraft, 2002. Hardcover, 358 pages. ISBN: 1570087237; EAN: 9781570087233.)

The Universal Hunger for Liberty

On the forty-second page of “The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable” author Michael Novak wrote (some emphasis added):

must note the quiet but strong culture of German pietism in which Kant grew to maturity.

From the point of view of modern history, of course, it seems absurd to say that humans are not means but only ends. In the 20th century, more than a hundred million persons in Europe alone died by violence, often in a way they could not have foreseen even in their worst nightmares. In the last century history has been a butcher's bench, and the words "human dignity" have often sounded empty.

Solidarity

When Leo XIII described in Rerun Novarum (1891) the tumultuous changes then churning through the formerly agrarian and feudal world of premodern Europe, he saw the need for a new sort of virtue (a reliable habit of soul) among Christian peoples, laypeople especially, and he wavered between calling it "justice" or "charity," or "social justice" or "social charity."²¹ By the time of Centesimus Annus (1991) one hundred years later, John Paul II had brought that nascent intuition into focus in the one term "solidarity." By this term he did not mean the great Polish labor union that contributed so much to bringing down communism—although no doubt the worldwide fame of the term "Solidarnosc" added helpful connotations to what he intended—but rather the special virtue of social charity that makes each individual aware of belonging to the whole human race, of being brother or sister to all others, of living in communio with all other humans in God. Solidarity is a deeper concept than "globalization," for it adds the dimension of communal interiority and personal responsibility. Solidarity is not an impersonal habit of losing one's self in groupthink, disappearing into a collectivity. Solidarity points simultaneously to the personal responsibility and initiative of the human subject and to communion with others. It is exactly the reverse of what socialists meant by collectivization. Solidarity does not lull individual conscience but rather awakens it. Solidarity evoks responsibility, enlarges personal vision, and connects the responsible self to all others.²²

In these days of "globalization," even as described in merely economic terms, it is almost impossible for any intelligent human being to imagine the self as an unencumbered, detached, solitary individual unliked to others.

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(Basic Books, September 2004. Hardcover, 304 pages. ISBN: 0465051316; EAN: 9780465051311.)

Standing for Something

On the forty-second page of “Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes” author Gordon B. Hinckley wrote (emphasis added):

that in thirty seconds' time they could influence their viewers to buy the products or services they were peddling. Are we really to believe that hours, leading to years, of television viewing will not affect attitudes about everything from family life to appropriate sexual relations?

Similarly, pornography, which is a seedbed for more blatant immorality, is no longer regarded as back-alley fare. In too many homes and lives, it is now regarded as a legitimate slice of entertainment. Pornography robs its victims of self-respect and of an appreciation of the beauties of life. It tears down those who indulge and pulls them into a slough of evil thoughts and possibly evil deeds. It seduces, destroys, and distorts the truth about love and intimacy. It is more deadly than a foul disease. Pornography is as addictive and self-destructive as illicit drugs, and it literally destroys the personal relationships of those who become its slaves.

Not one of us can afford to partake of this rubbish. We cannot risk the damage it does to the most precious of relationships—marriage—and to other interactions within the family. We cannot risk the effect it will have on our spirit and soul. Salacious videotapes, 900 telephone numbers, the filth found on the Internet, sensual magazines and movies—all are traps to be avoided like the deadliest of plagues.

Many years ago, I worked in a Denver railroad office, where I was in charge of the baggage and express traffic carried in passenger trains. One day I received a telephone call from my counterpart on another railroad in Newark, New Jersey, who said that a passenger train had arrived without its baggage car. Three hundred patrons were angry, as well they had a right to be.

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(Three Rivers Press, March 2001. Paperback, 256 pages. ISBN: 0609807250; EAN: 9780609807255.)

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

On the forty-second page of “The Civil War as a Theological Crisis” Notre Dame professor & historian Mark A. Noll wrote (emphasis added):

of the Bible almost never found support in the South and only rarely among Northern moderates and conservatives. In general, it was a use that suffered particular difficulties when, as in the ground rules laid down for Blanchard and Rice in their Cincinnati debate, disputants pledged themselves in good Protestant fashion to base what they said on the Bible as their only authoritative source.²¹

Harriet Beecher Stowe's lightning-rod novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, provided one of the era's most powerful examples of the abolitionist appeal to the general spirit of the Bible. The question of the Bible and slavery appeared repeatedly in the novel, which was serialized in 1851 and then published to great acclaim (and scorn) the next year. Stowe, herself a dedicated if romantic partisan for the Bible, nonetheless subtly queried widespread American notions about the self-interpreting power of Scripture. For example, she had one of her slave-owning characters, Augustine St. Clare, suggest that scriptural interpretation was driven more by interest than intellect: "Suppose that something should bring down the price of cotton once and forever, and make the whole slave property a drug in the market, don't you think we would have another version of the Scripture doctrine? What a flood of light would pour into the church, all at once, and how immediately it would be discovered that everything in the Bible and reason went the other way!"²²

Stowe also intimated the cynical conclusion, which would become more common among secularists after the Civil War, that the Bible was easily manipulated to prove anything with regard to a problem like slavery that readers might desire. "Honest old John Van Trompe," with an instinctive objection to slavery, long had kept himself at arms' length from church because of ministers who claimed that Scripture sanctioned the institution. But when he found experts on the other side who could use Greek and Hebrew to attack slavery as effectively as others had used such knowledge to defend it, Van Trompe, in Stowe's dialogue, "took right hold, and jined the church."²³ At another place in the novel, Stowe had passangers on a steamboat, which was carrying slaves down the Ohio River, exchange biblical texts with each other like bird shot. On the one side: "'It's undoubtedly the intention of Providence that the African race should be servants—kept in a low condition,' said a grave-looking gentleman in black, a clergyman, seated by the cabin door. '"Cursed be Canaan: a servant of servants shall he be," the scripture says.'" On the other side: "A tall, slender young man, with a face of expressive of great

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(University of North Carolina Press, April 2006. Hardcover, 216 pages. ISBN: 0807830127; EAN: 9780807830123.)

Finding Our Way Again

On the forty-second page of “Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices” pastor Brian McLaren wrote (emphasis added):

see Paul's message echoing Jesus' message, calling people to a way of life characterized by reconciliation with God, one another, and all creation in a global community.

If we try to see the story unfold this way, flowing from Jesus to Paul, the plot takes an unexpected turn in the months and years after Jesus' departure. To nearly everyone's surprise, it becomes clear that the way of God taught by Jesus will include Gentiles as well as Jews. This is no small adjustment. After all, how can bacon-eating, Sabbath-breaking, uncircumcised newbies be equals and partners in the mission of God in the world with people who are part of a two-thousand-year-old sacred tradition? How can this radical inclusiveness be justified in terms of the Hebrew Scriptures? How can it be worked out practically in faith communities spread across the Roman Empire?

Instead of reading Jesus primarily in the light of Paul, we need to read Paul primarily in the light of Jesus.

This is precisely where Paul steps in. As a former Pharisee and bitter enemy of the Jesus way, he knows what this fledgling movement has to overcome in order to be more inclusive. Perhaps because of his background, he sees as nobody else can how precious and needed—and fragile and vulnerable—the reconciling way of Jesus is. Paul the Pharisee becomes Paul the apostle to the Gentiles.

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(Thomas Nelson Publishers, May 2008. Hardcover, 216 pages. ISBN: 0849901146; EAN: 9780849901140.)

Christianity

On the forty-second page of “Christianity: A Very Short Introduction” author Linda Woodhead wrote (some emphasis added):

Christianity operates, in other words, by taking basic elements of 'natural', unredeemed life and sacralizing them by bringing them into relation with the transforming power of God. It does the same with time, dividing up the calendar not on the basis of nature's seasons and rhythms, but according to the life and death of Christ. Thus the Christian world counts time forwards from the birth of Christ, and organizes the year around Christ's birth (Christmas), his death and resurrection (Good Friday and Easter), and other lesser feasts and fasts. Even the Christian week pivots around the day on which Christ was raised from the dead (Sunday) (see Figure 13, page 60). By hearing God's word, and by receiving the sacraments, individual life, social life—indeed the whole of creation—is conformed ever more closely to the higher power of God, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of the God-man.

Spirit and world

The characteristic Christian framework of sin and salvation abases the human and exalts the divine. The good life is not the life lived according to one's deepest instincts and desires, but the life lived according to the higher standards of God as witnessed to by Christ. One must destroy and give up one's own will and appetites in order to live wholly according to the pattern of Christ. Thus God, the saviour and the means of salvation—Word and sacraments—are all 'objective' and external to the believer. One is saved not by what lies within, but by what lies outside and is in a significant sense alien to the human condition.

This outward and objective orientation is qualified, however, by Christian belief in the Holy Spirit. God the Father dwells above in the heavens, and His Son sits on his right hand. But not only did His Son come down to earth to save us, He is still rpesent and accessible on earth by way of His Spirit. In Christian thought, the Spirit is inseparable from Father and Son; 'He' is the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ. Rather than existing above the world, the Spirit is God's presence in the world—and in the heart of the believer. In

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(Oxford University Press, July 2005. Paperback, 168 pages. ISBN: 0192803220; EAN: 9780192803221.)

Crossing the Threshold of Hope

On the forty-second page of “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” Pope John Paul II wrote (some emphasis added):

Is Jesus the Son of God?

From the "problem" of God, let's move on to the "problem" of Jesus, as in fact you have already begun to do.

Why isn't Jesus simply considered a wise man like Socrates? Or a prophet like Muhammad? Or enlightened like Buddha? How does one maintain the unprecedented certainty that this Jew condemned to death in an obscure province is the Son of God, of one being with the Father? This radical Christian claim has no parallel in any other religious belief. Saint Paul himself defined it as "a scandal and madness."

* * *

Saint Paul is profoundly aware that Chris is absolutely original and absolutely unique. If He were only a wise man like Socrates, if He were a

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(Alfred A. Knopf, September 1995. Paperback, 256 pages. ISBN: 0679765611; EAN: 9780679765615.)

Religion in America

On the forty-second page of “Religion in America: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)” author Timothy Beal wrote (hyperlinks & some emphasis added):

roughly 1,500 religious groups in America were "nonconventional," and most of those would be considered NRMs. Perhaps there is something about this history of social and political suppression, ironically situated within a general Protestant-inspired American ethos vaolorizing individualism and religious freedom from oppression, that contributes to or even inspires their growth. Perhaps, like the Hebrew babies born into slavery in Pharoh's Egypt, the more they are pressed down, the more they rise up and flourish.

New religious movements are often very unstable, in large part because they tend to form around charismatic individuals who claim to have special revelations. One might enjoy a mercuric rise only to disappear, almost without a trace, within a few years. Another might last exactly as long as its charismatic leader lives, or until she or he has another revelation that trumps the original. In some cases, pressure from outsiders can contribute to tragic demise, as was the case with David Koresh's movement. Among most NRMs with staying power, however, there tends to be a progression from marginal newness to mainstream maturity. Much like the early Jesus movement in the first and second centuries, as these new religious movements grow in numbers and stability, they develop constitutions and organizational hierarchies that facilitate their assimilation within larger social and governmental structures. Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witness are good examples.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s, combined with immigration policy changes that opened the doors to growing numbers of people identified with non-Western religious traditions, created ideal conditions for the emergence of a great many new religious movements. Steven Stein provides helpful introductions to several of them. We'll briefly examine four of his examples plus a fifth that he does not examine, the Aryan Nations, which I have researched more extensively. In the process of considering these five NRMs, we'll gain some sense of the wide variety of new religious

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(Oxford University Press, USA, July 2008. Paperback, 144 pages. ISBN: 0195321073; EAN: 9780195321074.)

The Bible

On the forty-second page of “The Bible: A Very Short Introduction” (#14 in the Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press) University of Glasgow professor John K. Riches wrote (emphasis added):

twist to the story, from the 1820s onward it became a widespread practice among (Protestant) Bible societies to print Bibles without the Apocrypha at all. More recent ecumenical editions of the Bible, like the Common Bible, have restored the Apocrypha or deutero-canonical books.

The Christian New Testament

The process of the formation of the Christian canon of the New Testament (that is, of writings which have a specifically Christian origin) is not all that dissimilar from that by which the Hebrew scriptures came to be canonized.

In the early days of Christianity, there were of course no scriptures written by Christians. 'Scripture' for the early Christians was what they would subsequently come to call the scriptures of the Old Testament. Nor is it likely that the first Christian writings were composed as scripture. Once, however, Christian writings began to be seen as scripture themselves, there was a need to distinguish them from the older writings. The terms 'old testament' and 'new testament' come into currency at the end of the second century. Originally they referred respectively to the covenants which God had made with the people of Israel through Moses and with the church through Jesus. The sense was that these were books beloging to the old or new covenant, not that the books themselves were the covenants. Later of course the terms came to refer to the books themselves, as on the title page of the King James Bible: 'The Holy Bible conteyning the Old Testament, and the New' (see Fig. 3).

How did the Christian writings of the founding figures come to be recognized as authoritative for the church? The purposes of the books are varied: Paul's letters were occasional communications to churches around the Mediterranean (or exceptionally to an individual, Philemon), addressing specific matters of belief and practice. They

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