A Paragraph in the Life of Joel

I just read a few pages in one of the 9 books I have to read this semester and then it hit me: "why should I keep all this good information to myself?" So, with that being said, here is a paragraph that I'm confident will change your world view, your life, and the way you order take out...

One frontier of the study of Christian spirituality, for which little has been done to date, is the relationship between the shifting styles of spirituality-i.e., the dominance in turn of apophatic/speculative, speculative/katphatic, kataphatic/affective, or affective/apophatic-and the nature of human institutions. The hypothesis is that a relation exists, just as it does in all forms of knowledge, and that this expresses itself in styles of devotional action characteristic of an age. Having stated the hypothesis any documentation must be offered very hesitantly. There are some tenative and partial correlations. Apophatic forms of prayer seem to be related to the collapse of social institutions. The fourth and fifth centuries and the fourteenth centuries were times of an emphasis on apophatic prayer. The decline of the Roman Empire and the shaking of the structures of feudalism, particularly as effected by the plague, coincide with these times...

Okay ... that is enough. I'll spare you the rest. Suffice it to say that my reading assignments don't always fire me up. I mean after reading that scholarly stuff did you feel more compelled to reach out to the lost or feed the poor or even to not want to yell at the guy with 18 items in the 15 items or less lane at the store? Me neither.

But hey, it's my blog right? If I want to e-bellyache then who is to say no?