Joshua D

“I was slowly coming to adopt the new mentality that when you put connections with other people first, things tend to work out.”
― Jennifer Fulwiler, One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both

“Scripture is a record of the same story told again and again, in different ways but always with the same theme, for more than three thousand years. God loves man. Man betrays God. Then God calls man back to his friendship. Sometimes that call involves some very painful suffering, and for good reason. God respects our freedom. But he will not interfere with our choices or their consequences, no matter how unpleasant. As a result, the struggle in the human heart between good and evil—a struggle that seems burned into our chromosomes—projects itself onto the world, to ennoble or deform it. The beauty and the barbarism we inflict on one another leave their mark on creation.”
― Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

“The Church will endure until the end of time. We have the Word of God on that. But how and where she survives is another matter. “The question,” as one scholar suggested, “is whether her life in our time will be indifferent, fearful and corrupt, or a luminous proposal to the world of a more excellent way. The answer in our time, as so often in the past, may depend upon small communities that mirror to the world the light that came into the world, the light that has not and will never, never ever, be extinguished.”
― Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

“We need to engage him with our whole lives. That means cleaning out the garbage of noise and distraction from our homes. It means building real Christian friendships. It means cultivating oases of silence, worship, and prayer in our lives. It means having more children and raising them in the love of the Lord. It means fighting death and fear with joy and life, one family at a time, with families sustaining one another against the temptations of weariness and resentment.”
― Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World