James Smith

“Faith, in its forming of images of the ultimate environment, never finds analogues that fully or with complete accuracy bring out and express its knowing.”
― James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning

“I never really gave much thought to the fields while flying over them. It just seems like a whole lot of empty space from above, but I wonder how many half-naked kids you'd see rolling around in them if you zoomed in.”
― George Watsky, How to Ruin Everything: Essays

“Termed variously as "secularization," "religious disenchantment" or "modernism," this movement has given rise to an essentially new form of consciousness. It has construed knowledge as empirically demonstrable facts; it has subordinated ethics and aesthetics to what works or is workable; it has reduced intimacy to sexuality and inflated sexuality to fetishism. It has come to see faith as belief or a belief system and, in what passes for tolerance or "understanding," maintains a dogmatic attitude of relativism regarding the truth or appropriateness of all such "systems of belief.”
― James W. Fowler

“I point out these details because we are tactile creatures. Fabric, leather, graphics, paint, paper—these substances and surfaces we surround ourselves with powerfully affect us.”
― Rob Bell, How to Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living