Mike

“It is often said that Europeans learned religious intolerance from the Old Testament. Then how did we happen to skip over the parts where the laws protect and provide for the poor, and where oppression of them is most fiercely forbidden? It is surely dishonest to suggest we learned anything at all from the Torah, if we have not learned anything good from it. Better to say our vices are our own than to try to exculpate ourselves by implying that our attention strayed during the humane and visionary passages. The law of Moses puts liberation theology to shame in its passionate loyalty to the poor.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“I suppose it was in the eighteenth century of our era that the notion became solidly fixed in the Western mind that all this narrative was an attempt at explaining what science would one day explain truly and finally… But the beauty of the myths is not accounted for by this theory… Over time these narratives had at least as profound an effect on architecture and the visual arts as they did on literature… This kind of imaginative engagement bears no resemblance whatever to an assimilation of explanatory models by these civilizations… The notion that religion is intrinsically a crude explanatory strategy that should be dispelled and supplanted by science is based on a highly selective or tendentious reading of the literatures of religion. In some cases it is certainly fair to conclude that it is based on no reading of them at all.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”
― Michael Lewis

“There is no strictly secular language that can translate religious awe.”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books