Word: cosmos
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...letter recommends a task force to locate the source of political lethargy, but on this, the anniversary of the Army-McCarthy hearings’ first day, I’ve got my own blaming to do. Frankly, Harvard seems destined to a lofty place in the bourgeois cosmos, today re-established after decades of deviation from the path of the Boston Brahmin, all of us again participating in just the “naked self-interest” Marx inveighs against in his manifesto. No one expresses more than a tinge of voiceless, ‘moral’ disgust...
...elegant one. A central goal of today's physics, in fact, is to show that at its very beginning, the universe was ordered and unified. But this unity didn't last for long. Just instants after the Big Bang, as the explosion cooled and its contents scattered, the cosmos' forces and matter differentiated. The universe fell from a state of perfect grace into its current complexity, in a cosmic parallel to Adam...
...cosmos filled with peripatetic objects like comets, stars appear to be reliable anchor points. But even in the otherwise orderly Milky Way, at least 10 stars have jumped the rails, blasting along at more than a million miles (1.6 million km) per hour. Mysterious as all of them seem, there's one that's a true puzzle...
...world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very...
Wright: Both that, and the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their "souls going to Heaven." If people think "my physical body doesn't matter very much," then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn't matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says...