“It is true that he found in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and—until toward the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself—an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.”
― The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
― The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.”
― The Words and Wisdom of Thomas Merton.
― The Words and Wisdom of Thomas Merton.
“It takes a profound conversion to accept the belief that God is tender and loves us just as we are, not in spite of our sins and faults, but with them. God does not condone or sanction evil, but he does not withhold his love because there is evil in us. The key to this understanding is the way we feel about ourselves. We cannot even stand or accept love from another human being when we do not love ourselves, much less believe or accept that God could possibly love us.6”
― A Glimpse of Jesus: The Stranger to Self-Hatred
― A Glimpse of Jesus: The Stranger to Self-Hatred
“Uncovering history can be like walking up to a log in the woods that looks usable on the surface until you kick it over and find the underside rotten. We can trace much of today’s ideological decay to a seemingly benign US history that was in fact used to deny reparative justice and justify the segregation of Black people.”
― The Humanity Archive: Recovering the Soul of Black History from a Whitewashed American Myth
― The Humanity Archive: Recovering the Soul of Black History from a Whitewashed American Myth
“Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.”
― The Words and Wisdom of Thomas Merton.
― The Words and Wisdom of Thomas Merton.
Bill’s 2025 Year in Books
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