Daniel Hernández

“Even if a person were to finally and irrevocably reject God so as to choose the privation of evil, opting for nonbeing instead of being, God, the ground of all being, would continue to sustain that person in being.17 The doctrine of Satan envisages that God does not destroy being, or allow it to be subsumed by nothingness. As such, the doctrine is a powerful statement of God’s unconditional commitment to creation and to enemy love. Understood thus, the doctrine of Satan is but a footnote in support of Catholicism’s sacramental vision of the universe whereby the omnipresent God is understood to exist in and through all things.”
― Alan McGill, The Possibility of Satan: A Case for Reformulating the Catholic Church’s Teachings on the Devil

“We Christians don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church. We come as we are—no hiding, no acting, no fear. We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image. We come with our addictions—to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food. We come with our differences, be they political, theological, racial, or socioeconomic. We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale. We come to air our dirty laundry before God and everybody because when we do it together we don’t have to be afraid.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“Rather than original sin—a moral depravity and incapacity passed on from generation to generation—we have a death-infected world created by a primal act of disobedience. Thus the Orthodox don’t speak of original sin but of an ancestral sin, a primal event where death was introduced into the world. The condition we inherit from Adam and Eve is less moral than mortal.”
― Richard Beck, The Slavery of Death

“Oddly, as I look back on Jesus' time from the present perspective, it is the very ordinariness of the disciples that gives me hope. Jesus does not seem to choose his followers on the basis of native talent or perfectibility or potential for greatness. When he lived on earth he surrounded himself with ordinary people who misunderstood him, failed to exercise much spiritual power, and sometimes behaved like churlish schoolchildren. Three followers in particular (the brothers James and John, and Peter) Jesus singled out for his strongest reprimands—yet two of these would become the most prominent leaders of the early Christians. I cannot avoid the impression that Jesus prefers working with unpromising recruits. Once, after he had sent out seventy-two disciples on a training mission, Jesus rejoiced at the successes they reported back. No passage in the Gospels shows him more exuberant. “At that time139 Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said,‘ I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew