FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Deciding When You Don’t Know for Sure

re: Richard John Neuhaus, "...we act in the courage of our uncertainties. I am fond of pointing out that the word decide comes from the Latin decidere, to cut off. You face choices—whether to be a priest, whether to go to this school or that, whether to marry a certain person, whether to pursue this line of work or another—and then you decide. And, in deciding, you have cut off the alternatives and pray you have decided rightly. But you do not know for sure. Alternatively, you are trapped in the tangled web of indecision. /In this connection, I have had frequent recourse, both homiletically and personally, to one of the most liberating passages from Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 4... [snip]... I was thinking about the above while reading a recent and splendid book by John Peter Kenney on Augustine’s Confessions. The book is The Mysticism of Saint Augustine and, in Kenney’s “rereading” of Augustine’s classic text, the emphasis is on the inescapably Christocentric character of Augustine’s experience. /This is against the frequent reading of the Confessions as a psychological thriller, which downplays the specifically Christian and theological in Augustine’s story..."...