Adam Parker

“Professional people should know their clients outside their offices. Teachers should know the families of their students. University professors and intellectuals should know the communities and the households that will be affected by their ideas. Rich people and poor people should know each other. If this familiar knowledge does not exist, then these various groups will think of each other and deal with each other on the basis of stereotypes as vicious and ultimately as dangerous as the stereotypes of race.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

“Didn’t Hitler speak about the need for Christian morality and about divine providence guiding Germany’s history? Didn’t Germany need a strong ruler who would get the economy moving again and defeat Germany’s enemies? Christians were flattered by Hitler’s claim to support Christianity, and they lacked the unwavering biblical commitment to standards of justice that would have cautioned them against trusting his unjust plans. Bonhoeffer was one of the very few Christian leaders to see from the start that Hitler was too authoritarian, too dictatorial, too unjust, and too warlike. After Hitler’s election, Bonhoeffer preached that Christians have only one Lord, Jesus Christ, and not some other lord, a secular authority.”
― David P. Gushee, Kingdom Ethics, 2nd ed.: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It should be dangerous to attack a warrior, but when we turn our protectors into cowed puppies, they sometimes do not even have the spirit to defend themselves from the kicks of an ungrateful public. And in the end, they may not be able to protect us and our loved ones at the moment of truth. It”
― Lt. Col. David Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace