Barth, CD I/1 7:11 pm

"human affairs - even those over which we think we have some control - often take a different course from the one planned"

7:14 pm

"I regard the analogia entis as the invention of the Antichrist..."

7:18 pm

"I believe that I understand the present-day authorities of the Church better than they understand themselves..."

7:23 pm

"fortunately the reality of the Church does not coincide with its action"

7:38 pm

"there never has actually been a philosophia christiana, for if it was philosophia it was not christiana, and if it was christiana..."

7:44 pm

"...the Christian Church certainly does not number Aristotle among its ancestors"

7:49 pm

"dogmatics is possible only as theologia crucis..."

7:56 pm

"dogmatics must always be undertaken as an act of penitence and obedience"

7:57 pm

"we always seem to be handling an intractable object with inadequate means"

Trump: My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try. Ceresney: Let me just understand that a little. You said your net worth goes up and down based upon your own feelings?

Trump: Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day ...

Ceresney: When you publicly state a net worth number, what do you base that number on?

Trump: I would say it's my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked. And as I say, it varies.

via cnn.

Just in time for Easter, an Israeli television journalist has produced a pair of nails he says may have been used to crucify Jesus Christ. "Were not saying these are the nails," says Simcha Jacobovici, holding aloft a pair of smallish iron spikes with the tips hammered to one side. "Were saying these could be the nails."

via TIME.

seriously?

via Discovery News:

...increased life expectancy results in a "postponement of religious involvement," especially for religions that don't tie eternal rewards to time and favor ideas such as personal salvation over predestination.

This may account for an increasing number of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples seeing "greying" religious congregations, researchers say.

Although other factors influence religious participation, age alters how people perceive the costs and benefits of religiosity through time. People may consider the time and effort taken to worship as a cost, while weighing the benefits of gaining a sense of community, greater spirituality and personal confidence in the afterlife.

In places with low life expectancies, the risk of dying is more of a reality, which may account for higher religiosity, the researchers say.

We don’t simply own products; we have relationships with them. Intimate ones at that. We are in a state of courtship with every brand in existence. Each of them wants to be a part of our lives, and each wants love in return. Thinking about our relationships with particular products and brands in the same way that we think about interpersonal relationships yields interesting insights. When we decide to bring a person or product into our lives, we must first evaluate our options. The criteria we use to decide whether we love, hate or are indifferent to another person are the same we use to judge a product or brand.

via Smashing Magazine.

iPad 2 shortage has spread to the afterlife as Chinese families in Malaysia rush to buy paper replicas of the popular new gadget to burn for their dead as part of a centuries-old rite.

During the Qingming festival, also known as the tomb sweeping festival, Chinese communities in Asia honor their ancestors by burning fake money or replicas of luxury items such as flashy cars and designer bags.

The festival, which stems from Confucian teachings of loyalty to family and tradition, is also celebrated widely among the Chinese in Malaysia, who make up a quarter of the 28 million people in the mostly Muslim but multicultural country.

"Some of my customers have dreams where their departed relatives will ask for luxury items including the iPad 2," said prayer item shopkeeper Jeffrey Te as he filled cardboard chests with fake money at his shop on the outskirts of the capital.

"I can only offer them the first iPad model," he added, pointing to shelves stocked with the gadget along with paper iPhones and Samsung Galaxy Tabs.

Te shipped in 300 iPad 2 replica sets from China for the Qingming festival, which has just flown off the shelves and left him struggling to meet demand -- a scenario Apple Inc also faces.

In Te's shop, the first and second generation paper iPads sell at a dollar for 888 gigabyte capacity, an auspicious number in Chinese culture. A basic 16 gigabyte iPad for the living costs $499.

For some Chinese, technological gadgets will not be part of the shopping list for their dead relatives.

"They belong to the older generation. If you give all these so-called iPads, they don't know how to use it," said Thomas Soong, 61, as he set fire to a pile of fake money at his grandmother's grave on the fringes of the Malaysian capital.

via Reuters.

THE YOUNG MAN HAD FALLEN OFF A CLIFF WHILE HIKING. Now he was in a coma. His doctors in Stanford’s intensive care unit determined that he had suffered massive, irreversible brain damage and would never make a meaningful recovery. His parents, who knew their son would not have wanted to remain in the zombie-like limbo afforded by a mechanical ventilator, decided to withdraw life support. They also wanted to donate his organs. “It was an incredibly altruistic gesture in the midst of a tragedy,” recalls Carlos Esquivel, MD, PhD, chief of Stanford’s Transplantation Division, of the seven-year-old case.

But Esquivel also recognized that organ donation helps many parents cope with their grief over the loss of a child. So he was upset when David Magnus, PhD, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, arrived at the scene to inform the transplant team that the procedure could not go forward. “It was just the thought that we couldn’t fulfill the parents’ wishes,” Esquivel says.

Magnus, who is occasionally summoned to the hospital to advise doctors on end-of-life issues, including the advisability of organ donation, recalls the scene as “very tense.” At the time, Stanford permitted the removal of organs only from voluntary living donors — a mother donating a kidney to her daughter, for example — and from non-living donors whose deaths were based on the loss of all brain function. But this young man’s brain stem was still active, albeit barely, so donation was not an option.

via Stanford University School of Medicine.