Recent

Stephen E. Fowl

Disciples are called to “live your lives in a manner worthy of the Gospel” [Philippians 1:27]. But this translation doesn’t capture the concreteness of Paul’s admonition.

The Greek word translated as “live your life” is politeuesthe, from polis, and is more accurately translated as “live your lives as citizens,” or better yet, “let your politics be worthy of the Gospel of Christ.” The word’s clear meaning has to do with living as a citizen, or managing civic affairs, or conducting one’s self as pledged to some law of life.

Paul makes it very clear that the interests and aims of the church are different from and largely at variance to the interests and aims of the empire.

Rubem Alves

Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. . . . Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope. — Rubem Alves

Robert Schreiter

In forgiving, we do not forget; we remember in a different way. — Robert Schreiter

Abelard

By doubting we come to inquire, and so to truth. — Abelard

Rubem A. Alves

Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it. — Rubem A. Alves

Henri Amiel

Life is short. And we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us. So, be swift to love, and make haste to be kind. — Henri Amiel

Frederick Buechner

Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full. — Frederick Buechner

William Bryant Logan

Hospitality is the fundamental virtue of the soil. It makes room. It shares. It neutralizes poisons. And so it heals. This is what the soil teaches: If you want to be remembered, give yourself away. — William Bryant Logan

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.

Nicholas Kristof

For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year [2012], about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands. — Nicholas Kristof