Author: ppadmin

William Ury

The peace we can aspire to is not a harmonious peace of the grave, nor a submissive peace of the slave, but a hardworking peace of the brave. — William Ury

Annie Dillard

There is no one to send, not a clean hand nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us. . . . — Annie Dillard

Slavoj Zizek

. . . the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism. — Slavoj Zizek

John Howard Yoder

To avoid revolution means to take the side of the establishment. To say that the church should not meddle with the problem of open housing is to conclude that the house owner and the real estate agent, even if members of the churches, receive no concrete moral guidance from beyond themselves. To say that it is not the business of the church to second-guess the experts on details of political or military strategy, to have judgments on the moral legitimacy of particular laws, is to give one’s blessing to whatever goes on. Those who object to the church’s having something to say about economies, especially if that be critical of the existing capitalistic order, have no qualms about seeing the church on the other side of the economic question, or about economies having a say in the life of the churches.

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Charles Mathewes

We might call this the “Eisenhower strategy” [of public theology], or its general attitude is encapsulated in Eisenhower’s (in)famous claim, “our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith and I don’t care what it is.” — Charles Mathewes

Barbara Brown Taylor

Prayer is more than something I do. The longer I practice prayer, the more I think it is something that is always happening, like a radio wave that carries music through the air whether I tune in to it or not. — Barbara Brown Taylor

David Steindl-Rast

[P]ain is a small price to pay for freedom from self-deception. — David Steindl-Rast

Kathleen Norris

For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed and take us to places where we didn’t want to go.

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Wendell Berry

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do. — Wendell Berry