The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the harsh realities and sacrifices associated with love and justice as portrayed in the New Testament.
Terry Eagleton emphasizes the brutal reality that those who stand up for love and justice often face severe consequences, as highlighted in the New Testament through the figure of Jesus. The quote suggests that the essence of human existence is intertwined with suffering and sacrifice, challenging the illusions people may hold about morality and faith.
In practice
During a sermon reflecting on the sacrifices of historical figures for justice.
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
There are lots of research, of course, saying that a vast majority of us have been exposed to racial biases and stereotypes and, to some extent, we've internalized them, because that's so ubiquitous. That's why I'm so bored with the conversation about who's a racist and who's not.
Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.
And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.
War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.
Having therefore no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United States, in war, will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting places for them, where they can coal and repair, would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea.
The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place.
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