Conor

“How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each Truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.”
― J.I. Packer, Knowing God

“As adult Christians today we often find ourselves living in that time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, when the God we were raised on has been crucified but a sense of the resurrection has not yet sufficiently illumined our imaginations so that we can recognize the God who is walking beside us.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

“One intriguing piece of evidence suggests that Jesus may in fact have worked on the family farm as well as practising carpentry. Hegesippus, a 2nd-century writer, preserves the information that two grandsons of Jesus’ brother Judas were peasant farmers sharing a farm whose precise size was remembered. This must have been the family smallholding in Nazareth. The fact that they owned it jointly indicates that this family still followed the rather old-fashioned practice of not dividing the farm but keeping it as the common property of the extended family. Since Joseph had to provide for at least seven children (Jesus, his four brothers, and two or more sisters), he may well have taken up carpentry only to supplement the inadequate produce of the family farm. For this purpose, there would have been enough work within Nazareth.”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus: A Very Short Introduction

“Let us fast, then—whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat. Festally, first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored. But both ways let us eat with a glad good will, and with a conscience formed by considerations of excellence, not by fear of Ghosts.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection