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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8e179f1 | The moment that we think we know, we've lost our perspective on wisdom. | wisdom | Diana Butler Bass | |
| 2da0f05 | Spirituality is not just about sitting in a room encountering a mystical god in meditation or about seeing God in a sunset. Awe is the gateway to compassion. It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world. If we do not like the world or are afraid of it, we have had a hand in that. And if we made a mess, we can clean it up and do better. We are what we make. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 2fb5350 | Enacting love was a critical aspect of experiencing love. Devotion and ethics intertwined. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| a896c7a | When the Bible is read from the perspective of divine nearness, it becomes clear that most prophets, poets, and preachers are particularly worried about religious institutions and practices that perpetuate the gap between God and humanity, making the divine unapproachable or cordoned off behind cadres of priestly mediators, whose interest is in exercising their own power as brokers of salvation. The biblical narrative is that of a God who c.. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 2e088c1 | Conversion is not a single prayer. Conversion is pilgrimage. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 24e2fb2 | Unlike in our society, where we hide it, death surrounded medieval people. They had few hospitals, and so churches, poorhouses, and homes handled the dying and dead. Death was not a distant prospect at the end of a long, healthy life. It was integrated into ordinary experience. Medieval life was transitory, a journey through this world that often ended too soon and too abruptly. Death was often violent and unexpected. Extended death, throug.. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| a18e7f7 | Who, Abelard demanded, would forgive such a God for killing his own son? Abelard proposed that Christ died for the sake of love, providing a model of self-sacrificial passion for humankind. Salvation entailed imitating Christ in his love for others, the love that God revealed in Jesus's death for his friends. As Christ had done, we also do. As contemporary theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker say of Abelard's view, "The atone.. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 2f88892 | When I get a little money I buy books," he confessed to a friend. "If any is left, I buy food and clothes."13" | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 758dcf8 | Nadia's experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did. | woman | Mohsin Hamid | |
| aa598b1 | I can understand it," she said. "Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived." "Millions arrived in our country," Saeed replied. "When there were wars nearby." "That was different. Our country was poor. We didn't feel we had as much to lose." -- | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| e6bfc60 | time. A new interdisciplinary community of scientists, environmentalists, health researchers, therapists, and artists is coalescing around an idea: neuroconservation. Embracing the notion that we treasure what we love, those concerned with water and the future of the planet now suggest that, as we understand our emotional well-being and its relationship to water, we are more motivated to repair, restore, and renew waterways and watersheds. .. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| fd1e96a | Although churches seem the most natural space to perform spiritual awakening, the disconcerting reality is that many people in Western society see churches more as museums of religion than sacred stages that dramatize the movement of God's spirit. | religion spirituality | Diana Butler Bass | |
| 7acff2b | Gratitude is not about stuff. Gratitude is the emotional response to the surprise of our very existence, to sensing that inner light and realizing the astonishing sacred, social, and scientific events that brought each one of us into being. We cry out like the psalmist, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made!" (Ps. 139:14)." | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| b0a8f30 | I'm waiting now, but I will be ready. We are mutual participants, you and I, intertwined. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 0276acb | There is no one experience of gratitude; rather, it is a complex and episodic thing, and one that is deeply personal. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 660f59c | We must abandon the external height images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is. --Paul Tillich | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 06aac95 | The language of mysticism and spiritual experience cuts a wide swath through the world's religious traditions, and it presents an alternative theology, that of connection and intimacy. In Christian tradition, Jesus speaks this language when he claims, "The Father and I are one" (John 10: 30), and when he breathes on his followers and fills them with God's Spirit (20: 22); it appears in the testimony of the apostle Paul, who converts during .. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 35f3042 | Gratitude is complicated. Feelings of dependence--and interdependence--can be both elusive and resisted, mostly because they are caught up with soul-crushing ideas of obligation and debt. But if gratitude is mutual reliance upon (instead of payback for) shared gifts, we awaken to a profound awareness of our interdependence. Dependence may enslave the soul, but interdependence frees us. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| c614cae | Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal. --John F. Kennedy | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 3518e10 | The biggest issue of the twenty-first century is not necessarily the "decline" of neighborhood. It may be that we have all moved to a new neighborhood and have not learned how to get along with the new neighbors." | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 1d90b4a | The Vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you. It's about something that happened to me. | Anne Rice | ||
| d275aaf | Gratitude is not a psychological or political panacea, like a secular prosperity gospel, one that denies pain or overlooks injustice, because being grateful does not "fix" anything. Pain, suffering, and injustice--these things are all real. They do not go away. Gratitude, however, invalidates the false narrative that these things are the sum total of human existence, that despair is the last word. Gratitude gives us a new story. It opens ou.. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| ac033a0 | and in any case Nadia had taken one look at Saeed's father and felt him like a father, for he was so gentle, and evoked in her a protective caring, as if for one's own child, or for a puppy, or for a beautiful memory one know has already commenced to fade. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| c46df45 | Indeed, early commentators scarcely attacked Christian doctrines, but they consistently portrayed Christian devotional practices as radical and socially divisive. Christianity had effectively "created a social group that promoted its own laws and its own patterns of behavior."7 These behaviors, at odds with Roman custom, earned Christians the reputation of being revolutionaries and traitors to the good order of the state. Christian defender.. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| d9f2369 | Jews, Christians, and Muslims share a creation story from the Bible, found in the early chapters of the book of Genesis. Like many such stories, it begins with sky and earth intertwined in darkness. God first brings forth light, then separates what is above from what is below, thus making oceans, land, and sky. Although some people insist that Genesis 1 is a literal scientific account, it is best understood as what Old Testament scholar Wal.. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| f46c20d | The baby, the star, and the wise men: a story of gifts and radical gratitude. Joy to the world! | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 42b9b31 | Grace--gifts given without being earned and with no expectation of return-- | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| e49727c | Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness, and gratefulness is a measure of our aliveness. --DAVID STEINDL-RAST | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| e1a936a | Mi always thought of him as living in a body one size smaller than his being - part of him always rushing forward beyond the rest of him, leaving part of him behind. [...] Skin-tight, expressionless - and your self made up of dreams and stories - Boy Carlton - Boy Balfour - Boy Hannay. I know all your heroes, my dear one - I gave you the books in which you found them. | Timothy Findley | ||
| 56e61c9 | I've never met--have you?--a truly sophisticated man. World-weary and discreet--of course. But never sophisticated. | sophistication | Timothy Findley | |
| e54160d | So far, you have read of the deaths of 557,017 people - one of whom was killed by a streetcar, one of whom died of bronchitis and one of whom died in a barn with her rabbits. | war | Timothy Findley | |
| 65f38b4 | only one deaf God, who cannot see, remains--claiming all of creation as His own. If people would invest one hundredth of their devotion to this God in the living brothers and sisters amongst whom they stand, we might have a chance of surviving one another. As it is... | Timothy Findley | ||
| 91b0ff7 | You die when you can't be real, Dolly thought. When you can't see who you are and when you cannot see what it. | Timothy Findley | ||
| 4e8b26c | Go, he said; in peace. And sing with the whales. | Timothy Findley | ||
| 1451728 | You die when you can't be real, Dolly thought. When you can't see who you are and when you cannot see what is. | Timothy Findley | ||
| dbe06a1 | The art of presenting oneself, he had once told Sybil, lies in creating an immediate shock which is countered by a slow retreat into custom. People never quite recover from my cravats, but they will never find the equal of my tailor. To be memorable is all, when it comes to dress. | Timothy Findley | ||
| 9aa05bc | The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. | Anne Rice | ||
| 54777e9 | A woman walks by the gate, leading a little boy with a balloon of hunger in his belly and hair bleached by malnutrition. | poverty | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 7f9485d | A certain ambiguity of rhythm is one of the beauties of a poem | Anne Ridler | ||
| a559803 | So Erica felt better in a place like this, separated from the rest of us, where people could live in their minds without feeling bad about it. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 33531e8 | I could not respect how he functioned so completely immersed in the structures of his professional micro-universe. Yes, I too had previously derived comfort from my firm's exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now I saw that in this constant striving to realize a financial future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one's emotional present. In other words, my blinders were coming off, and I .. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 044a152 | My mind disappears behind desperate terror. | fear terror | Mohsin Hamid | |
| ed6a309 | If the choice is between being held up at gunpoint or holding the gun, only a madman would choose to hand over his wallet rather than fill it with someone else's cash. | stealing theft | Mohsin Hamid | |
| e97c7c9 | So long awaited that its coming was a shock. | shock wait | Mohsin Hamid |