Greg Coates

“For better or for worse, there are seasons when we hold our faith, and then there are seasons when our faith holds us. In those latter instances, I am more thankful than ever for all the saints, past and present, who said yes and whose faith sustains mine. They believe for me when I’m not sure I believe. They hold on to hope for me when I’ve run out of hope. They are the old lady next to me in the pew and the little kid behind me who recite the entirety of the Apostles’ Creed on my behalf on those Sundays when I cannot bring myself to say all those ancient words wholeheartedly—Is this what I really believe? They pray for me when the only words I have to say to God are words that I refuse to allow to be printed on this page, because they would make even my most foulmouthed friend blush.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith

“I also believe that no one is given a heavier burden than one is able to bear. What is most difficult for me is the fact that you are forced to share in carrying this burden. But the way in which you do it is, on the other hand, also a source of boundless happiness and strength for me. I am very happy that Maria has written you a letter filled with such courage and confident trust. Oh, how our life indeed depends completely on trust, and how impoverished life becomes without it. I am now learning daily how good my life with you has always been, and besides, I now have to practice myself what I have told others in my sermons and books.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“The Chinese counterpart to Greek agency was harmony. Every Chinese was first and foremost a member of a collective, or rather of several collectives—the clan, the village, and especially the family. The individual was not, as for the Greeks, an encapsulated unit who maintained a unique identity across social settings. Instead, as philosopher Henry Rosemont has written: “... For the early Confucians, there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others ... Taken collectively, they weave, for each of us, a unique pattern of personal identity, such that if some of my roles change, the others will of necessity change also, literally making me a different person.”
― Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

“The University’s charter of privileges, dating from 1200, was its greatest pride. Exempted from civil control, the University was equally haughty in regard to ecclesiastical authority, and always in conflict with Bishop and Pope. “You Paris masters at your desks seem to think the world should be ruled by your reasonings,” stormed the papal legate Benedict Caetani, soon to be Pope Boniface VIII. “It is to us,” he reminded them, “that the world is entrusted, not to you.” Unconvinced, the University considered itself as authoritative in theology as the Pope, although conceding to Christ’s Vicar equal status with itself as “the two lights of the world.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century