Chad Morris

“Agape happens when someone decides to forgive someone who wronged them instead of retaliating—and even to go out of their way to help him or her. It happens whenever people willingly decide to put the needs of others ahead of themselves; speak truth to power;[307] feed the hungry; clothe the naked; visit the imprisoned; release the captive; love the unlovable; forgive the unforgivable; associate with the disreputable; and to eat and drink with the unsavory. As theologian Søren Kierkegaard observed, this is a rigorous kind of love.”
― Roger Wolsey, Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity

“In my experience, conservative Christians often think they are accepting others, but then they undermine that alleged acceptance by saying that they, “Love the sinner, but hate their sin.” Genuine empathy doesn’t mean, “accepting” the person while criticizing everything about that person. As Thomas Merton put it, “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
― Roger Wolsey, Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity

“Sofia knocked. Anne Edwards, white hair pulled into a messy bun, flour up to her elbows, answered the door. “Oh, no!” she cried. “Not just brilliant but good bones as well. I do hope you have a terrible personality, dear,” Anne Edwards declared. “Otherwise, I shall lose faith in a just God.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“I’m made of everything that touched my senses during that time and entered the part of my brain where I keep my memories.”
― Sofía Segovia, The Murmur of Bees