What is this blog about?
It’s never been particularly easy for me to connect the reality of Jesus Christ with what’s going on in the world around me. It’s all too easy to divide the world into glib secular and sacred categories. But since “from him and to him and for him are all things,” those connections must exist. This blog is an attempt to carefully tease them out.
Where does the phrase “Motions of Grace” come from?
Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth century French mathematician and philosopher (and also the inventor of the syringe). He’s most famous for his eponymous Wager, which argues that it’s better to believe in Christ and be wrong than to not believe and be wrong. Throughout his life, he wrote down thoughts about intellectual and spiritual problems on scraps of paper; these were collected after his death into the Penseés (“Thoughts”). Number 507 reads, simply, “The motions of grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.”
This little fragment does a pretty good job, I think, of summarizing human experience.