O'donovan Quotes

Worship is Political Science 101. In every worship service, the Christian ekklesia is renewed in her unique story and language, her unique political experience and vocation. Every worship service is a challenge to Caesar, because every Lord's Day we bow to a Man on the throne of heaven, to whom even great Caesar must bow. O'Donovan claims that all political order rests on a people's homage to authority, which is to say, on an act of worship. Every Lord's Day, the Church is reconstituted as a polity whose obedience is owed to Christ, and we are taught to name Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords.

Now we’re riding a runaway train that’s carrying us all away to that final night where nothing is remembered and nothing matters.

I’m living the life of an urban hunter-gatherer—again.

Here comes the train; there goes the pain!

Where, I wonder, should I have been over the long years across the world without the spasmodic, always unexpected, and totally reliable friendship of companions like Donald Wise, and Ralph Izzard, and Patrick O'Donovan, and David Holden, and Louis Heren, and Sam White, and Richard Scott, and René MacColl, and Stanley Uys, and Ted Levite, and David Walker, and Tim Baistow, and Stanley Burch, and a score more of their kind, at any moment liable to appear through the swing-doors of anywhere between Tuscaloosa and Tonkin and reduce chaos to the healing anodyne of a glass and the shared misfortunes of existence. (On journalism in "Point of Departure" page 80)

My grandfather was a railroad brakeman, sixty years with the D&H. I'd sit on his lap when I was little, I remember, at the upstairs apartment on Watkins Avenue in Oneonta overlooking the tracks, and we'd look out at the yard together and watch the trains hooking up, and he'd pull his gold watch out of his vest pocket and squint at the dial, a gold pocket watch, and the bulging surface of the watch case was all scritch-scratched, etched with tiny soft lines, hundreds of tiny scratches, interlaced. And then he'd check the yard, my Grandpa, to see if the trains were running on time. In those days there was a rhythm to everything, there was an order to things, but now we're riding a runaway train that's carrying us all away to that final night where nothing is remembered and nothing matters.

bruises

his manner most pleasing and his voice deep and masculine. David stepped aside to allow Kathleen

We have inherited a tradition which has associated religion and politics in a way that has excluded some of our fellow citizens … When we become legislators, though, as we do when we vote in referendums, we legislate for all our fellow citizens. We do not vote as members of this or that church or faith. Of course we cannot leave our religiously based moral convictions outside the polling station, but we do need to remember the difference between civil and religious law. We also need to remember that it is possible to have deep and passionately held convictions without seeking to have those convictions imposed by the state on fellow citizens who do not share them and may have opposite convictions which are equally deep and passionately held.

37. On this point, and the whole paragraph, see especially Oliver O'Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

The summons to wakefulness is therefore a summons to attend to my agency.

There is another future quite different from it, which is the future we imagine, prompted by fears or hopes or lazy presumptions of regularity. Such projected futures are easy enough to construct in imagination, but ontologically they are shallow; they make little claim on our belief — even though they often market themselves at astonishingly high prices!

moments.” She tried to sit up,

El marco en torno al cual construimos nuestras vidas es frágil, y en una ciudad de seres interconectados una sola viga rota puede hacer peligrar los picos y las sombras de la línea del horizonte. Robbie O'Donovan murió mientras iba a la caza de algún sentimiento que llevarle a casa a una chica a la que se había negado a salvar, y al fallecer, convirtió en mierda estructuras que nunca había visto. Pequeñas casas. Pequeños refugios. Pequeñas vidas. La ciudad funciona a nivel macro, y ¿qué significa eso sino las agonías y los éxtasis vivos, palpitantes y sudorosos de cien mil pequeñas vidas? La ciudad de Cork no va a fijarse en los últimos pasos vacilantes de un hombrecillo perdido. Todas esas vidas, todas esas vigas entrecruzándose en el seno de la más magnífica de las estructuras..., la ciudad no verá los palos partidos ni percibirá las primeras chispas.

Cops need criminals, doctors need disease, and saints need lepers.

Nowhere do you see a real, integrated, full-blooded man or woman who shines like a beacon in this sea of disjointedness.

Los Angeles is a mother that devours her children.

The neon dust falls slowly, filtering through the stone canyons, settling on hats and fire hydrants, collecting on delicatessen awnings, filling the shopping carts and rickety baby carriages of the rag pickers with soft powdery snow.

Dear God, please make me believe that life has some sort of meaning and purpose.

I found myself thinking about Jacqueline, my second or third wife.

Los Angeles, this anthill, this slag heap, the city where I suffered and grappled with life and was defeated, and where I finally triumphed.

And when Prohibition came along, Dr. Sharpe’s Shakti Tonic took off like a rocket, mostly due to its hefty eighteen percent alcohol content.

Birth, copulation, death. You come out of one hole and you end up in another one. It’s a pretty short trip.

It’s been my experience in life that if you step back and simply allow events to take their course, things will usually work out okay. Or they won’t.

The enemy never sleeps!

You came out kicking and screaming, reluctant as hell to leave, and you spent the rest of your life trying to get back in.

We are all refugees, and we have the scar to prove it.

Your lifelong rebellion against all forms of authority stems from the infant’s desire to murder the father and possess the mother.

They needed someone to hate, a tangible focus for their remorse and disappointment, and I’d been elected, the projection of their own inner hell.

I was born under that star, the dung-beetle star.

Like the dung beetle, I had my comfortable burrow and my ball of sustenance, and like the dung beetle I was happy.

Meditation doesn’t lead to enlightenment because in meditation the ego is trying to destroy the ego.

I’m nothing more than a talking urinal cake. The world is pissing on me.

I’m back at Lafayette Park after a trip to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore, not to look at the books but to rub up against the female bookworms and to catch a buzz on the free herbal tea.

Having a job is like having a lobotomy.

I love LA! The freeways, the cars, the smog, the glitter, the glitz, the sleaze, the prostitutes, the poison that falls from the sky.

Compassion goes out looking for suffering, scouring the earth for poverty and misery and pain, the same way the cops look for criminals.

Theology must be political if it is to be evangelical. Rule out the political questions and you cut short the proclamation of God’s saving power; you leave people enslaved where they ought to be set free from sin—their own sin and others’. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations

The Sermon on the Mount remains the greatest moral document of all time.6 To justify this claim I want to probe Jesus’ moral vision by comparing Jesus’ Sermon to other moral theorists.7 From Moses to Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas to Luther and Calvin, and then into the modern world of thinkers like Kant and Mill all the way to contemporary moral theorists like Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, and also Oliver O’Donovan and Alasdair MacIntyre, some of the finest thinkers have applied their energies to ethics. How does Jesus fit into that history?8 In the history of discussion about ethics there have been some major proposals, and I want to sketch three of the most important, show how each can be used to explain Jesus, offer critical pushback against each, and then offer what I think is a more helpful approach to understanding the ethics of Jesus.

has often been suggested that moral (or practical) reason is distinguished by the fact that it is prescriptive, while theoretical (or speculative) reason is descriptive. That is certainly not right. Moral reason has a vast stake in description. It describes particular things, describes their relations and purposes, describes the way the world as a whole fits together. Without this descriptive exercise practical reason would not be reason at all. It cannot be that “reason is the slave of the passions.”5 That is to say, it cannot be that practical reason begins with a simple impulse, an undetermined will, which then calls on knowledge of what is true and false, independently arrived at, to shape the execution of its project. For the impulse on its own, apart from any rational description, can have no clear project. It cannot be the impulse it is — fear, desire, sympathy, or anything else — unless it knows something about the world from the start: there are things that pose a danger to existence, there is good that offers it fulfillment, there are fellow-beings whose case is like mine. World-description belongs, as they say, “on the ground-floor” of practical reason. There can be no prescription without it; neither can there be description which is neutral in its prescriptive implications. Only because this is so, can we think our way through the world practically.