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+The Case for wonder
+###################
+
+:date: 2005-04-25T07:54:00
+:category: faith
+
+The three similar stimuli met me in the last days. First I have read in
+“Communication as Culture” (James W. Carey, 1989) that a good sociology
+is similar to an art in its orientation towards “making the phenomenon
+strange”, because
+
+    […] the social sciences can take the most obvious yet background
+    facts of social life and force them into the foreground of
+    wonderment. They can make us contemplate the particular miracles of
+    social life that have become for us just there, plain and
+    unproblematic for eye to see. […]
+
+There is some beautiful naivety here at work — it is suddenly possible
+to take seriously the good old Aristoteles notion, that basis of all
+philosophy (i.e., all science, because it was contained in that time in
+philosophy) is curiosity and wonder. Moreover, for me personally it is
+calling back to the position where what really matters is something
+really personal and internal (after all, we are talking here about a
+qualitative research, not just data crunching).
+
+And just immediately when I have begun to think about writing a blog
+record like this one, I opened again “More ready than you realize”
+(Brian McLaren, 2002) and found there this (p. 145):
+
+    Modern Christianity has (inadvertently, I think) tended to reduce
+    God to a being containable by human concepts or propositions or
+    logic. It has too often acted as though it had God bottled, labeled,
+    and hermetically sealed, a commodity we own and attribute at will,
+    logically proven, and theologically defined. […] No wonder
+    evangelism seems dreary under these circumstances. As Walker Percy
+    once wrote, instead of “Jesus saves!” we could as well easily be
+    shouting “Exxon! Exxon!” because God has become a product we are
+    selling or promoting. […] Christianity has not always been like
+    this. Gregory of Nysa of the fourth century once said, “Concepts
+    create idols. Only wonder understands.” Martin Luther reputedly
+    reflected this realization: “If I could understand one grain of
+    wheat, I would die of wonder.”
+
+And finally, when I was talking with a friend this afternoon, she told
+me about her feelings of people having too big expectations from her.
+After some further talking I suggested (because I begun to see the
+pattern) that actually the only way (aside from knowing that God knows
+as well and has neither too high expectations and in the same time he is
+not full of depression and self-hate as we are) how to defend herself
+against these feelings is to go deeper in knowledge of herself, and from
+that position to be able to stand up against any unreasonable (or
+misguided) expectations.
+
+And of course, it is something which is of the utmost importance for me
+as well. What I am writing about images in newspapers, should be
+especially the most personal expression of myself — not stupid
+graphomaniac diatribes which does not interest anybody, but that the
+only measure of what I should write is what I honestly know about
+myself, not what anybody expects from me.
+
+This was an interesting experience.