We are supposed to believe [capitalist ideology] was the champion of freedom and prosperity in the epic struggle called the Cold War. If there was such a champion, might it not have been freedom itsel...
Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
I would advise you against defensiveness on priciple. it precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith.
Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to...
A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it oth...
Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all...
Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an ob...
The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I've thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing stri...
Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.
There's a patter in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced...
When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situa...
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hand...
Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.
This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very fin...
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.
Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
In the First Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt this instruction was inappropriate. When we accept dismissive judgements of our community...
Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flower...
I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.