India has a perfect translation for Jesus's word in the term Dalit, literally "crushed" or "oppressed." This is how that country's so-called Untouchables now choose to describe themselves: as we might translate the biblical phrase, blessed are the untouchables.

jenkins, the next Christendom, p.256

...his Canadian counterpart warned that "Bishops are not intercontinental ballistic missiles, manufactured on one continent and fired into another as an act of aggression."

jenkins, the next Christendom, p.241

to which i say, apparently you've never read Acts.

In 2003 Southern opposition found a visible face in Peter Jasper Akinola, the primate of the powerful Church of Nigeria, who expressed implacable opposition to Anglo-American sexual liberalism. At every point, he stressed that he was objecting not to specific policies or actions, but to what he viewed as a Northern betrayal of the most basic tenets of Christianity, a literally diabolical lurch into non-Christian heresy. Responding to the proposed elevation of Jeffrey John, Akinola thundered, "This is an attack on the Church of God -- a Satanic attack on God's Church." To the prospect of gay unions, he warned that "If England adopts a new faith, alien to what has been handed to us together, they can walk apart.... No Church can ignore the teaching of the Bible with impunity, and no Church is beyond discipline."

philip jenkins, the next Christendom, p.236-237

gray fields

the land around me is flat

though over the corner of the highway there

slinks a gully into a ravine, which quietly grows

into a valley,

an arena for dirt devils to dance.

i quietly skirt the side of the hill, on

my right the fields naked of crops, barns empty

of years and of hay.

that dirt is gray - not brown with dry anticipation

nor yet black with the life that shoots out of death -

gray - not the loud green of the valley or the brash

browns of the hillsides but gray.

Gray with a quiet tired nod, gray as a

concession to overuse and abuse,

gray that knows no other life as it looks

bemused and puzzled at the valley where it

struggles to hold its grain down to earth as sun

pulls the gold - gray, i say, with quiet

shattered dreams of a single good harvest traded

for a dozen half-reapings and now gray with

baffled loss and denial and false cheer and an awful

resignation.

once i met a farmer with eyes brown with a longing

quiet and suppressed, as if he were Noah waiting on a flood.

"don't farm nothin," he said with a dark, quiet smile that did not

need me to understand, but "it's gonna take a while

for this land to come back.... maybe by the time your son

wants to farm." and i wonder about that when i

look up ahead at the corn harvest over land that

once was gray and wonder if rachel's

eyes will ever be green again.

and, by way of disclaiming, rachel does not exist. or rather, she's not named rachel. the story about the farmer is true, and the quotes are unedited.

st. thomas aquinas

Et ideo convenienter divina sapientia homini auxilia salutis confert sub quibusdam corporalibus et sensibilibus signis, quae sacramenta dicuntur.

my translation of aquinas

And therefore it is fitting that Divine wisdom gives the help of salvation to men through these various corporeal and sensual signs, which are called sacraments.

the newadvent.org translation, "literally translated by fathers of the english dominican province"

Divine wisdom, therefore, fittingly provides man with means of salvation, in the shape of corporeal and sensible signs that are called sacraments.

while i fully realize that it's my word here against the fathers of the dominican order, i've never seen auxilia used to denote anything other than an aid or help. while "means" could easily fall in this realm, "means" has an entirely different connotation with regards to salvation. i believe aquinas meant for the sacraments to be aids or helps of salvation, not vehicles, causes, or purveyors of it.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.

1 john 4:18-19