Category Archives: Institutions and buttonholes

Do symbolic orders form “closed systems” that depend on a “buttonholed” meaning that may or may not veil its own history. Can an “institution” be defined as a symbolic order or “language” that rules out mapping onto other symbolic orders or “languages”? This topic is addressed in chapters 7, 8A, 11, 12 and 13.

08/17/16

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.2 BA-3

[The Progressive button cannot continue to hide the buttonhole of God’s opening to love.

When will viewers and critics realize that they are watching the same moral lesson over and over again in mainstream television dramas and comedies? Why do the characters never really develop into human beings?

Look how TV, as a way of talking, exploits.

Only when the button slips from the buttonhole will we find virtue, as well as our own shameful undoing.

This will come long after most of us have turned, from television, to other ways of talking.]

05/11/16

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.2D

[To me, the nested forms of recognition and participation model both grace and self-destruction as actualities.

The state of grace is different from the state of self-destruction.

However, Schoonenberg pays tribute to a different contrast.

Grace (as supernatural) is different from nature (as natural).

This concern belongs to modernism. Modernism focuses on actuality and ignores normal context and possibility.

Or maybe, moderns focus on actuality in order to hide their agendas (normal contexts) and manipulations (biasing what is possible).

The contrast between grace and nature is a stand-in for the contrast between the supernatural and the natural.

Does this distinction belong to the realm of actuality?

Or, does it belong to the realms of normal context and possibility?]

12/6/15

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.2 DP-1

[In God, all things are possible, which means that opportunities exist.

All we have to do is exercise our freedomconcrete.

Our consciencefree is always ready.

Here, ‘free’ means free from the dictates of a professor who insists that ‘free to choose’ means a woman’s right to abort that “thing” that will bond a woman to her husband and expect that husband to provide.

That “thing” is a human being.]