James Smith

“I hate how, when you tell people that your friend threatened to hit you, the first thing that they say is "Well, did they really hit you?" as if threatening to hit someone isn't damaging in itself.”
― Jami Page

“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

“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 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