Wade

“Are we simply self-conscious animals improbably appearing for a moment in a cosmos without purpose or significance? If so, that has implications for life, which even ordinary people can work out. Or are we rather illusions of individuality destined to dissolve into the ultimately real Absolute? That would make a difference. Are we instead really materially acquisitive hedonists or carnally desiring sensualists who have nothing higher to which to aspire than the gratifications of possessions and physical sensations that we can use our money and relations to consume? Or maybe only bodies with capacities to define by means of the exercise of will and discourse our identities through self-description and re-description? Or perhaps are we children of a personal God, whose perfect love is determined to rescue us from our self-destruction in order to bring us into the perfect happiness of divine knowledge and worship? Or maybe something else? The differences matter for
how life ought to be lived, how we ought to live, as individuals and as a society.12 And ultimately we have no choice but to adopt some position, even if by default our culture adopts it for us. I think we ought to want to embrace a position that is deliberately considered and believed for good reasons.”
― Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

“to Tocqueville, and reiterated by Robert Bellah and collaborators in their landmark study of American life Habits of the Heart, this pursuit of what one does not have makes it difficult for people to form bonds with one another. Their minds “are more anxious and on edge.” Because “they clutch everything,” they can “hold nothing fast.”
― Christian Smith, The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose

“Although all things with physical substance are real, not all real things have physical substance.”
― Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

“God sees fit that we should taste of that cup of which his Son drank so deep, that we might feel a little what sin is, and what his Son's love was. But our comfort is that Christ drank the dregs of the cup for us, and will
succor us, so that our spirits may not utterly fail under that little taste of his displeasure which we may feel. He became not only a man but a curse, a man of sorrows, for us. He was broken that we should not be broken; he was troubled, that we should not be desperately troubled; he became a curse, that we should not be accursed. Whatever may be wished for in an all sufficient comforter is all to be found in Christ.”
― Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed