Jonathon Neville

“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.

That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.

They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?”
― A.R. Moxon

“Science likes to measure things, to test hypotheses and collect data. Until quite recently science wasn’t testing hypotheses about animal feelings. From the time Charles Darwin wrote his last book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) to about the time Neil Armstrong left footprints on the moon nearly a century later (1969), prevailing scientific dogma denied animals their hearts and minds. A nonhuman animal was viewed as merely a responder to external stimuli. The idea that a walrus made decisions, or that a parakeet felt emotions, was considered unscientific.”
― Jonathan Balcombe, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

“It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain "wound identified" (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to "redeem the world," as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life