Word: ramseys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Princeton Theologian Paul Ramsey observes that "ours is the first attempt in recorded history to build a culture upon the premise that God is dead." In the traditional citadels of Christendom, grey Gothic cathedrals stand empty, mute witnesses to a rejected faith. From the scrofulous hobos of Samuel Beckett to Antonioni's tired-blooded aristocrats, the anti-heroes of modern art endlessly suggest that waiting for God is futile, since life is without meaning...
Socialization has immunized man against the wonder and mystery of existence, argues Oxford Theologian Ian Ramsey. "We are now sheltered from all the great crises of life. Birth is a kind of discontinuity between the prenatal and post-natal clinics, while death just takes somebody out of the community, possibly to the tune of prerecorded hymns at the funeral parlor." John Courtney Murray suggests that man has lost touch with the transcendent dimension in the transition from a rural agricultural society to an urbanized, technological world. The effect has been to veil man from what he calls natural symbols?...
...ultimate becomes useful and intelligible." That is not to say that God is necessarily found in the depths of anxiety. "Rather we are in the region of our experience where God may be known, and so where the meaningful usage of this word can be found." To Ian Ramsey of Oxford, this area of ultimate concern offers what he calls "discernment situations"?events that can be the occasion for insight, for awareness of something beyond man. It is during these insight situations, Ramsey says, that the universe "comes alive, declares some transcendence, and to which we respond by ourselves...
...difficulties of doctrine" that separate the two churches: papal supremacy and infallibility, the bodily ascension of Mary into heaven, the refusal of the Roman church to recognize the validity of Anglican holy orders, the insistence by some Roman Catholic priests that converts from the Anglican Church must be rebaptized. Ramsey also said bluntly that his church found Paul's easing of Catholic rules on mixed marriages (TIME, March 25) unsatisfactory to Anglicans-presumably because the Roman church still insists on marriage before a priest and raising children as Catholics...
...calling on Rome demonstrated courage and initiative. Paul summed up the encounter as "one of friendship and a move toward union, if not yet a meeting of perfect unity." As the prelates parted, Paul slipped off his diamond-and-emerald episcopal ring and gave it to Michael Ramsey...