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The empirical argument of this book is that worship has not receded in a supposedly “secular” world, but has rather migrated from the explicit worship of God to the implicit worship of things of human creation.
“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.”
― Holiness and Desire
― Holiness and Desire
“We listen and take our truths—all of us—from people we trust, who know us and have our interests at heart. This is a built-in bias of the human psyche, and the crux of the fix we’re in as we stand as nations divided against themselves. As long as we live in entirely separate worlds, without comprehension of the others language or daily grind, the door between us is sealed. Not a word will pass from one side to the other. Barbara Kingsolver—Introduction to A Sand County Almanac”
― A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
― A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
“The denial of emotion is a terrible thing; what takes time is learning that the positive path is the education of emotion, not it’s uncritical indulgence, which actually locks us far more firmly in our mutual isolation. Likewise, the denial of rights is a terrible thing; and what takes time to learn is that the opposite of oppression is not a wilderness of litigation and reparation but the nurture of concrete, shared respect.”
― The Way of St Benedict
― The Way of St Benedict
“If the Hebrew Bible contains a political theology, then two of its central principles are: (1) a rejection of all political idolatry, and therefore a distrust of monarchs, who often make gods of themselves; and (2) a demand for social justice, and therefore a distrust of the well-to-do, who often hoard riches for themselves. These principles are invoked again and again by the Jewish prophets, from Amos through Isaiah and on to the man known as Jesus (Brueggemann, 1978).”
― American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump
― American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump
“The problem again is one of direction; Christianity moves from God to humanity, whereas idolatry moves from humanity toward the divine. The image of God restored in humanity by Jesus Christ is a gift of God, not a ladder which we can climb to attain God. A proper theology of nature can never be a way of obviating the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, as if we can simply read God off of the creation. The Incarnation, in other words, is a statement about how God has chosen to use material reality to reveal Godself, not a statement about the intrinsic revelatory nature of material reality as such.”
― The Uses of Idolatry
― The Uses of Idolatry
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