The cross is about more than Jesus; the depth of meaning in the cross is that we have a wounded God. God did not take a pass on Golgotha. . . . When the sacraments are defined by the God on the cross, they constitute resistance to empire and the assurance of God prevailing. . . . It is the cross that keeps the Eucharist from being a pacifier for the future and a peace-engendering moment. — David O. Woodyard
Author: ppadmin
David O. Woodyard
Conservatives have traditionally reduced [the “born again” text of John 3:16] to, “Have you found Jesus?” The individual is set apart and privatized. [Frederic K.] Herzog centers on “Have you found your neighbor?” . . . To be born again is to enter into a relationship with oneself, one that is corporate and in solidarity with others, especially the powerless and poor.
Read more ›Nathan Mitchell
[W]orship does not create an “alternative world” to which we can retreat when ordinary life becomes intolerable. . . . When liturgy becomes a self-absorbed attempt at “religious behavior” or when it calls attention to itself as something “unworldly,” it ceases to be worship and becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Christian worship is inherently worldly. Its primary symbols are drawn from the messiest activities of human life: giving birth and dying, washing and smearing bodies with oil, eating and drinking, unburdening one’s heart in the presence of another. All this is the septic stuff of the world’s drama—and the stuff of Christian liturgy as well.
Read more ›Kenneth Leech
So there is a movement from the soul to God, from God to the soul, and from the soul to society and the world. The contemplative life can never be one of self-indulgent absorption, even of a purely personal absorption in and enjoyment of God. Rather there must be an active expression of the inward union and love in relation to the world.
Read more ›Paul Verghese
Regard the flesh, the body, matter, as evil, or even inferior, and one has already begun the deviation from Christian truth.
Read more ›anonymous
"The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." —Then-Senator Barack Obama, Dec. 20, 2007, in response to concerns that then-President George W. Bush would strike Iran — anonymous
anonymous
In 2011 political columnist David Brooks asked readers over 70 to write and send him “‘Life Reports'—essays about their own lives and what they done poorly and well.” Maybe the most revealing of the conclusions he drew: “Lean toward risk. It’s trite, but apparently true. Many more seniors regret the risks they didn’t take than regret the ones they did.” — anonymous
anonymous
Seven Deadly Social Sins, Mahatma Gandhi * Politics without principle * Wealth without work * Commerce without morality * Pleasure without conscience * Education without character * Science without humanity * Worship without sacrifice His grandson Arun Gandhi added an eighth: Rights without responsibility — anonymous
anonymous
“The disciples carried weapons,” Derek Melton, assistant chief of police in Pryor Creek, Okla., and senior pastor at Pryor Creek Community Church, told Religion News Service in 2012. “Peter cut a man’s ear off. I believe if more honest citizens were armed, the safer our communities would be.” — anonymous
anonymous
Indispensable nation? If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. (Interview on NBC-TV "The Today Show" with Matt Lauer, Columbus, Ohio, February 19, 1998, defending the US role in enforcing an embargo on Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991. Historian James Chace and President Bill Clinton presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal apparently coined the term in 1996 to capture the essence of Clinton’s liberal-internationalist vision of the post–Cold War world. President Bill Clinton used it in his January 20, 1997, inauguration speech and in a 1998 speech outlining the rationale for the NATO’s intervention in Bosnia. President Barack Obama used the phrase at least twice, in his January 24, 2012, State of the Union Address and May 2012 commencement address at the US Air Force Academy Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeated the "indispensable nation" claim in a February 2013 speech and again in her 2014 book, Hard Choices. — anonymous