Kenny

“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.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

“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

“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

“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