On the Square Today

Elizabeth Scalia on being bored beyond endurance :

I am bored by the same people saying the same things, week after week, and by their dismaying contempt for curiosity, and by my own, too. A few days ago, the gaffe-prone (far more than the press will admit) President Obama said, “the private sector is doing fine.” Opposition predictably jumped on it; sympathizers predictably worked to spin it; all of the same people who have been in our faces for decades were in our faces again—on television, on the radio, in social media—and their busy words, predictably, boiled down to “shut up; other opinions are unconscionable and do not belong at our lunchtable.” No one seemed remotely curious to ask, “does the president actually believe this? If so, why? Is his brain all right?”

Also today, Wesley Hill on St. Paul, theologian of the Trinity :

It’s become a commonplace in modern literature on the apostle Paul to observe that he wasn’t a systematic theologian. One need look no further than a standard textbook from the last century, which offers the colorful exhortation not to “rank the tent-maker of Tarsus along with Origen, Thomas Aquinas, and Schleiermacher.” “Paul did not theoretically and connectedly develop his thoughts,” adds Rudolf Bultmann, the titan of twentieth-century New Testament scholarship, “as a Greek philosopher or a modern theologian.” Paul was a pastor, missionary, and letter-writer, not a member of the Sorbonne.