Dan Walbert

“Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themselves, since they must always react to forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame.”
― Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

“Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that’s wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

“For the moral ideal of our society has been the autonomous, self-sufficient, free person. Autonomy has been taken to mean that we are not and should not be dependent on the past or upon others. To be free means to have no ties. Economically this has been reinforced by a capitalist economy that needs workers who are readily mobile. Politically the development of the autonomous person seemed necessary for democracy, since it is precisely the man without convictions that frees politics from ideological perversions. Democracy is the social order designed to eradicate the true believer in order to create the pragmatic man of compromise.8”
― Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic

“I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it. I miss civilization, and I want it back.”
― Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought