Kenny

“Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Conversion means that people change their direction, not their character or their history. Desire, that constant reminder that there is something beckoning beyond any immediate horizon, is there to be re-purposed; it is not there to be torn out or thrown away or violently bent out of shape. The flowering of desire in the human soul is a herald for God‘s presence, because desire points towards something we have not made for ourselves and cannot encompass. It speaks God’s truth: that the perfectly regulated and performed self is not, in fact, available to anyone. Neither the religious nor the secular closed self can thrive.”
― Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire

“Vocation is the response a person makes with his or her total self to the address of God and to the calling to partnership. The shaping of vocation a total respond of the self to the address of God involves the orchestration of our leisure, our relationships, our work, our private life, our public life, and the resources we steward, so as to put it all of the disposal of God’s purposes in the services of God and the neighbor.”
― James W. Fowler, Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian: Adult Development and Christian Faith

“The images of communal survival and flourishing our culture feeds us all to easily blur our vision of God‘s new creation – for instance, we think America is a Christian nation, and democracy the only truly Christian political arrangement. Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture. In order to keep our allegiance to Jesus Christ pure, we need to nurture commitment to the multicultural community of Christian churches. We need to see ourselves and our own understanding of God’s future with the eyes of Christians from other cultures, listen to voices of Christians from other cultures so as to make sure that the voice of our culture has not drowned out the voice of Jesus Christ.”
― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation