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f389924
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Germany, richer than India, has about seventy energy-storage projects, about a third of which collect the output from wind and solar plants into banks of batteries. The price of batteries, like the price of photovoltaics, has been falling. Renewable-energy enthusiasts imagine great warehouses full of batteries, soaking up excess sun power by day, releasing it by night, keeping the lights on in the dark. But no matter how cheap the batteries..
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Charles C. Mann |
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31db630
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Energy from the sun today is responsible for about 1 percent of India's electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just 5 percent. Optimistic scenarios show its share rising to 10 percent by 2022.
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Charles C. Mann |
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df790c1
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Modi shifted gears, refashioning himself as a nattily dressed, tech-friendly progressive who lured major companies, foreign and Indian alike, to invest in Gujarat.
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Charles C. Mann |
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94b0693
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Realizing that solar had become essential to oil production, petroleum firms set up their own photovoltaic subsidiaries. Exxon became, in 1973, the first commercial manufacturer of solar panels; the second, a year later, was a joint venture with the oil giant Mobil. (Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999.) The Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), another oil colossus, ran the world's biggest solar company until it was acquired by Royal Dutch Shell, ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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2182e54
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Sun power's image as the province of baling-wire hippies was at odds with reality. Today's multibillion-dollar photovoltaic industry owes its existence mainly to the Pentagon and Big Oil. The first wide-scale use of solar panels had come in the 1960s: powering military satellites, which couldn't use fossil fuels (too bulky to lift into space) or batteries (impossible to recharge in orbit). By the 1970s photovoltaics were cheaper, but the in..
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Charles C. Mann |
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661a695
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When Chapin tested these novel photovoltaics, they converted about five times more solar energy to electricity than the older selenium panels. But they were still terribly inefficient. Chapin estimated the cost of silicon panels that could supply electricity for a typical middle-class home at $1.43 million (about $13 million in today's dollars). It would be cheaper to cover the entire roof in gold leaf. Daunted by the economics, most resear..
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Charles C. Mann |
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f3bb484
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Fuller and Pearson placed a thin layer of the first type of doped silicon (extra electrons) atop a layer of the second type (extra holes). The two Bell researchers attached the little assembly to a circuit--a loop of wire, in effect--and an ammeter, a device that measures electric currents. When they turned on a desk light, the ammeter showed the two-layer silicon suddenly generating an electric current. The same thing happened with sunligh..
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Charles C. Mann |
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f8a4efb
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Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for explaining the photoelectric effect. But Fritts's invention remained a laboratory curiosity.
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Charles C. Mann |
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6fc1239
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As schoolchildren learn, the sun washes Earth with every imaginable type of light wave--X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, you name it. About a third of the total is reflected from clouds. Another sixth is taken in by airborne water vapor. That leaves roughly half of the incoming light--most of which is visible light, as it happens--to pass through the atmosphere. Almost all of that half i..
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Charles C. Mann |
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dccb78d
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Brand cites the example of France, which constructed "fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation's electricity in just twelve years." Nuclear power provides about 77 percent of French electricity, a far greater proportion than in any other nation. Today, according to World Bank figures, France emits 5.2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita. The corresponding figure for the United States is 17. France shut down its last coal-fired po..
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Charles C. Mann |
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aa66869
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Two years after winning the divisive 1968 election, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, declared that "the environment," "the great question of the '70s," was a "cause beyond party and beyond factions." The Clean Air Act of that year, which set up U.S. emissions regulations, was one of the world's first general air-quality laws, more stringent and comprehensive than any of its predecessors. Congress passed it overwhelmingly: 73-0 in the ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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ef6fe84
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Katrina was a relatively modest storm that overwhelmed inadequate dikes and levees. Many climate scientists believe that in days to come governments will need to get better at shoreline defense. The world has 136 big, low-lying coastal cities with a total population of about 550 million people. All are threatened by the rising seas associated with climate change.
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Charles C. Mann |
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f5a9392
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In the past few decades, China has lifted more than half a billion people out of destitution--an astonishing accomplishment. That advance was driven by industrialization, and that industrialization was driven almost entirely by coal. More than three-quarters of China's electricity comes from coal. More coal goes to heating millions of homes, smelting steel (China produces nearly half the world's steel), and baking limestone to make cement (..
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Charles C. Mann |
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77b73de
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Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world's annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-British-Dutch-Belgian team in 2014). It could put as many as a billion people at risk by 2050 (a Dutch team in 2012). Test cases occurred in 2017, when storms inundated Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys.
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Charles C. Mann |
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5b80ec0
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Much the same is occurring in India. Already the world's fastest-growing economy, India will become the world's most populous nation (probably by 2022) and its biggest economy (possibly by 2048). It, too, runs on coal--with similar consequences. New Delhi, ringed by coal plants, is said to have the world's most polluted air, worse than anything in China. India's outdoor air pollution causes 645,000 premature deaths a year, according to a 20..
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Charles C. Mann |
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d9e13d7
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Shanghai, with an average altitude of thirteen feet, is among the many Asian cities vulnerable to rising waters.
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Charles C. Mann |
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54b1a3b
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About 85 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuels, and about 80 percent of those come from just two sources: coal (46 percent) in its various forms, including anthracite and lignite; and petroleum (33 percent) in its various forms, including oil, gasoline, and propane. Coal and petroleum are used differently. Most petroleum is consumed by individuals and small businesses as they heat their homes and offices and..
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Charles C. Mann |
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477cd7b
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Oil and gasoline use is diffuse, scattered in the global crowd. The world has 1.3 billion vehicles and perhaps 1.5 billion households. Cutting emissions from these cars and homes means changing the daily lives of billions of people, a mind-boggling thought. Reducing global coal emissions, by contrast, means dealing with 3,300 big coal-fired power plants and several thousand big coal-driven steel and cement factories.*10 The task is huge, bu..
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Charles C. Mann |
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910c3ff
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Measurement began in February 1958. Within two years his instruments showed that the world's store of airborne carbon dioxide had increased in that period from about 313 parts per million to about 315 parts per million. Keeling worked on Mauna Loa from 1958 until his death in 2005, during which time the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air rose to 380 parts per million. Combined with the work by Revelle and Suess, Keeling's meticulous, d..
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Charles C. Mann |
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24ab2be
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To their dismay, DeConto and Pollard had realized that Antarctica might be more vulnerable than previously thought. Increasing temperatures would attack the ice in two ways: warmer air would melt it from above, forming pools on the surface, and warming ocean currents would eat at the underside of the sheet, creating large cracks. The pools on the surface could drain through the cracks, widening them and splitting the ice sheet into unstable..
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Charles C. Mann |
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c610e55
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For a geophysicist, what's going on is stunning," my friend told me. "We used to believe these systems needed thousands of years to make these shifts. Instead it's happening so fast that it's terrifying. Conceivably, you could start seeing truly bad effects in a hundred years."
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Charles C. Mann |
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5a0c02f
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And this is one of the great difficulties in thinking about climate change: what seems terrifyingly fast on the geological scale is unfathomably long on the human scale. By "truly bad effects" DeConto meant flooded coasts, vanished islands, awful droughts, and, maybe, storms of unprecedented power. But even if these occur in the time he fears--even if they transpire in the geologically insignificant span of a century--they will not be seen ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8922df7
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On the one hand, forcing other people to clean up our mess violates basic notions of fairness. On the other hand, actually preventing climate-change problems would require societies today to make investments, some of them costly, to benefit people in the faraway future. It's like asking teenagers to save for their grandchildren's retirement. Or, maybe, for somebody else's grandchildren. Not many would do it.
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Charles C. Mann |
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8e1860f
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Intuitively, I am hard-pressed to believe that most people would endorse the notion that the future of humankind is worth no more than a single apartment. Chichilnisky, a major figure in the IPCC, has argued that this kind of thinking about discount rates is not only ridiculous but immoral; it exalts a "dictatorship of the present" over the future. Economists could retort that people say they value the future, but don't act like it, even wh..
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Charles C. Mann |
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5914be3
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The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.
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Charles C. Mann |
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8399258
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Logically speaking, the desolation in Children of Men is peculiar. As Scheffler points out, all people have known from childhood that they will die. As individuals, we have no long-term future. Personal extinction is guaranteed. But this tragedy--one that will be directly experienced by every single man, woman, and child--provokes no public alarm. No tabloid has ever blared the headline, "All 7.3 Billion of Us to Vanish Within Decades." Our..
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Charles C. Mann |
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ef4e24a
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What this suggests is that, contrary to economists, the discount rate accounts for only part of our relationship to the future. People are concerned about future generations. Even if the logic is hard to parse, they think that humanity's fate is worth more than an apartment.
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Charles C. Mann |
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73820f4
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In the middle, where most people spend their days, it is hard to distinguish morally between positions. It is easy to disparage people who think only of their family or neighborhood. But higher up the ladder is not necessarily better--think of the numberless instances where people, genuinely believing that they are acting for the benefit of larger entities, have ended up doing awful things. Would the world have been better off if the soldie..
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Charles C. Mann |
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cc61684
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Climate scientists encountered Lorenz's ideas in 1965, when he gave the keynote address at a conference in Colorado called "The Causes of Climate Change," the first big scientific gathering devoted to the subject. As he described the instability he had uncovered, his audience made the connection with carbon dioxide. Conference organizer Roger Revelle, who had been skeptical, was persuaded. If small changes in initial conditions could have e..
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Charles C. Mann |
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4b9f748
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Geoengineering may reduce temperatures globally, but there will still be local losers and winners--places that experience too much or too little rainfall, places subject to sudden temperature extremes. And no matter how much sulfur dioxide humankind throws into the heavens, the carbon dioxide will remain; to counteract the ever-increasing total, more sulfur must be launched into the air every year. Indeed, stopping it suddenly would be disa..
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Charles C. Mann |
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ddff4fb
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According to the "universality studies" conducted by psychologists Paul Ekman, Carroll Izard, and Friesen (1969-1972), the words Happiness. Fear. Anger. Sadness. Contempt. Surprise. Disgust. describe the natural expressions of emotion shared by the entire human race."
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communication-skills
customer-service-quotes
expressions-of-emotion
law-of-attraction-quotes
motivational-speaker-susan-young
quotes-by-susan-c-young
relationship-quotes
smiling-quotes
susanspeaks-com
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Susan C. Young |
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52b41fc
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In Eudora Welty's masterful story "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually disgraceful circumstances. The narrator, Sister, is outraged at having to cook two chickens to feed five people and a small child just because her "spoiled" sister has come home. What Sister can't see, but we can, is that those two fowl are r..
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Thomas C. Foster |
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0e22102
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Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.
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literature
reading
reading-life
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Thomas C. Foster |
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eef77f8
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We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.
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death-of-literature
literature
progress
stagnant
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Thomas C. Foster |
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e2294b8
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There is, in fact, no form of dysfunctional family or no personal disintegration of character for which there is not a Greek or Roman model.
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Thomas C. Foster |
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3a8c85d
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So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden
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Thomas C. Foster |
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d596d13
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Countering this view, confessing Christians seek to maintain the unity of the church through discipline, not through division. The confessing movement is strongly committed to staying WITHIN. It is better for churches to learn to respect their own legislative processes and discipline themselves accordingly than to face the even greater problems of separation, division of property, and the anguish of divorce. Confessing Christians seek to re..
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church-discipline
schism
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Thomas C. Oden |
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ab42666
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God is the uncreated source and end of all things; one; incomparably alive; insurmountable in presence, knowledge, and power; personal, eternal spirit, who in holy love freely creates, sustains, and governs all things.
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Thomas C. Oden |
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ef1e07a
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One need not disavow the gifts of intellect in giving thought to their Giver
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Thomas C. Oden |
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6304360
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Christ is the singular embodiment of truth, infinitely plural in meaning. Christ is the sum and hidden interior meaning of all other genuine revelations of God
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Thomas C. Oden |
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8ee61e7
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Christianity does not limit revelation to Christ, but through Christ sees God's revelation as occurring elsewhere and finally, echoing everywhere.
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Thomas C. Oden |
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9713a2d
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Christ is the unparalleled and unrepeatable Revealer through whom other revelations are best understood
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Thomas C. Oden |
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b76294f
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Humanity is God's constant preoccupation throughout the Bible. The Christian study of God cannot neglect God's own prevailing interest--the redemption of humanity. No Christian theology can speak only of God and never of human beings.
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Thomas C. Oden |
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45abef2
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Revelation is for human salvation, the mending of human brokenness (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 3).
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Thomas C. Oden |