Kenny

“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

“A political order must have the ability to shape the core ideas of political life. It must be able to do so not just for one political party’s most ardent supporters but for people located across the political spectrum. The New Deal order sold a large majority of Americans on the proposition that a strong central state could manage a dynamic but dangerous capitalist economy in the public interest. The neoliberal order persuaded a large majority of Americans that free markets would unleash capitalism from unnecessary state controls and spread prosperity and personal freedom throughout the ranks of Americans and then throughout the world. Neither of these propositions today commands the support or authority that they once possessed. Political disorder and dysfunction reign. What comes next is the most important question in the United States, and the world, now face.”
― Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era

“One might say that the difficulty in rearing children has to do with the ambiguities of independence. The child must separate from the parents; the parent must allow the child to discover his or her own reality. Where there was one, there must be two. But this separation, though necessary, is a complex and often tormented experience. The relationship between separation and loving attachment has to be negotiated each time afresh... There is no theory that can totally guide the parent...In the act of creation, there is perhaps inevitable sadness…”
― Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis

“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