Author: ppadmin

God does not need a defense attorney. God needs a witness! — H. Richard Niebuhr

I’ll be glad for the neuroscientists to help us unravel the knotty cognitive connections seen among people of faith in the dissonant affinities for semi-automatic weapons alongside scriptural mandates to love enemies, for hoarding alongside the holy writ’s warnings about possessions. But for now, in this culture of ours that is so addicted to violence and so possessed by the prospects of concentrated wealth at the expense of the poor, we need this Psalm [74] and its hopeful imagery of ultimate victory for the forces of peace and justice. — Stan Dotson

. . .whoso seeks the truth Shall find in no wise peace of heart. — St. Severinus (Boethius)

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. — Alfred Korzybski

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great. — Saul Bellow

Faith [is] a habitual confidence given us by Another in whose hands we can relax…. It means that what causes us to belong is a pattern of desire produced in us by someone we cannot see who is giving us the strength to live in the midst of this world as though death were not. And the access to this faith is desire: that we should want the gift of eternal life. It is the giving to us of this desire which we normally celebrate with that inverted religious rite called baptism. In this rite, we agree to undergo death in advance, so as to live thereafter with death behind us. It is an inverted religious rite, since it is not the crowd which gathers to drown the victim, but the candidate, not frightened of becoming a victim, who walks through the waters of being drowned so as to emerge on the other side into the welcome of those who are already living with death behind them. — James Alison

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self–to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it. — Barbara Brown Taylor

An inward transformation must produce an outward one. It is one thing to hang a few apples on a pecan tree. It is quite another to grow apples on an apple tree. The latter is a more reliable source of apples. Thus the regeneration of the apple tree, which then produces apples of itself and of natural necessity, is the best, indeed the only way to get apples. But those who claim to be apple trees without producing apples are kidding themselves. — Theodore W. Jennings

The past is never dead. It's not even past. — William Faulkner

[S]ustainable globalization still requires a stable, geopolitical power structure, which simply cannot be maintained without the active involvement of the United States. . . . The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. — Tom Friedman