Ong again: “Sound signals the present use of power, since sound must be in active production in order to exist at all . . . . Sound can induce repose, but it never reveals quiescence. It tells us that something is going on . . . . A primitive hunter can see, feel, smell, and taste an elephant when the animal is quite dead. If he hears an elephant trumpeting or merely shuffling his feet, he had better watch out. Something is going on. Force is operating.”
Which is why God creates by Word.
Letters
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…