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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f8c4086 | and her laugh was like a song that made you want to sing it. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 660e9ce | if he had been in any danger of turning his head at all, except perhaps all the way round like an owl. | Naomi Novik | ||
| da47fb7 | My first description held true: I felt as though I was picking my way through a bit of forest that I had never seen before, and her words were like another experienced gleaner somewhere ahead of me calling back to say, There are blueberries down on the northern slope, or Good mushrooms by the birches over here, or There's an easy way through the brambles on the left. She didn't care how I got to the blueberries; she only pointed me in the p.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| c8d786b | They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn't belong in their lives at all. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 977c499 | Happiness was bubbling up through me, a bright stream laughing. | Naomi Novik | ||
| fb8d140 | I am not whimpering, at all," Temeraire muttered, and added, "ow!" There" | Naomi Novik | ||
| 8b61969 | I say to you, here are the dangers. Some are more likely than others. Weigh them, put them all together, and you will know the cost. Then you must say, is this what you owe? | Naomi Novik | ||
| a1fc182 | if truth didn't mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn't come and listen. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 52b41fc | 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.. | Thomas C. Foster | ||
| 0e22102 | 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. | literature reading reading-life | Thomas C. Foster | |
| eef77f8 | 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. | progress literature death-of-literature stagnant | Thomas C. Foster | |
| e2294b8 | 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. | Thomas C. Foster | ||
| 3a8c85d | So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden | Thomas C. Foster | ||
| d596d13 | 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.. | church-discipline schism | Thomas C. Oden | |
| ab42666 | 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. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| ef1e07a | One need not disavow the gifts of intellect in giving thought to their Giver | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 6304360 | 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 | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 8ee61e7 | Christianity does not limit revelation to Christ, but through Christ sees God's revelation as occurring elsewhere and finally, echoing everywhere. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 9713a2d | Christ is the unparalleled and unrepeatable Revealer through whom other revelations are best understood | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| b76294f | 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. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 45abef2 | Revelation is for human salvation, the mending of human brokenness (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 3). | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 355efe4 | Human reasoning is created by God with a capacity for reaching toward God by thinking, choosing, and speaking. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| ccecb28 | Human freedom is created by God with a capacity for responsiveness to God. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 24fe3d4 | Human personality is created with the restless yearning for communion with the unseen but present personal God (Augustine, Conf. 1.1). | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 5253d71 | Human love is created with some capacity, however distorted, to love God and to love creatures through God. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 25570ae | Here is the essential movement. The reality of the church emerges out of the saving action of God in Christ through the Spirit; the church is the providential means and sphere through which persons are enabled to participate in eternal life. The birth of the church of Jesus Christ is engendered by the regenerating power of the Spirit. The nurture of the church occurs by grace through Word and Sacraments. The present church shares in the com.. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| e31fd18 | The most urgent and demanding question for Christian believers is not whether "a supreme being of some kind" exists, but rather whether this incomparably good and powerful and compassionate source and end of all things truly is as revealed in Scripture" | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| f988585 | Yet to decide that this One exists is not quite like deciding that anything else exists. For this decision assumes a wider implication that the decider shall order his or her life around the existence of this One, if this One exists at all. It is not merely a casual or theoretical decision that makes no necessary difference to the way one lives the rest of one's life | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 2a1f8c1 | Rightly understood, it is an all-embracing, intrusive question, and for this reason many prefer to dodge it or to proceed as if it were an abstract, theoretical question. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| b4778ff | The worshiping community confesses and intercedes on the basis of, not the theory of God's existence, but the experience of a multigenerational community of witnesses. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 032aa78 | A critical, probing faith is a necessary and useful stage toward an assured and confirmed faith (Job 3:1-26; Clement of Alex., Stromata 8.9; Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel). | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 422fcdc | The incarnation is God's own act of identification with the broken, the poor, with sinful humanity. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| d449e71 | Faith's premises are felt to be so valuable that they deserve the best intellectual reflection possible to confirm argumentatively what faith already knows inwardly | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 5f9ad77 | Just as God stepped out of his nature to become a partaker of our humanity, so we are called to step out of our nature to become partakers of his divinity" (Hilary of Arles, Intro. Comm. on 2 Pet. 1.4)." | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 96b4884 | Protestants at one time were confident that their free form of confession was a vast improvement upon Catholic private confession to a priest because it is voluntary, demystified, and not routinized. But amid the acids of modernity it has volunteered itself right out of existence. Demystification has dwindled into desacralization. The escape from routinization has become a convenient cover for the demise of repentance. The postmodern pastor.. | confession ministry pastoral-care church sin | Thomas C. Oden | |
| 0aba6be | Sins of ignorance or infirmity are to be admonished in a different way than intentional sins of malice of intention. The assurance of forgiveness is not to be offered carelessly by those whose conscience is seared, but to penitents who come contritely to the table of the Lord. | sins-of-commission sins-of-omission forgiveness sin | Thomas C. Oden | |
| 453e9f2 | Because cultures and languages are constantly changing and because the apostolic testimony must be attested in ever-new circumstances, it is a necessary feature of the apostolic tradition that it both guard the original testimony and make it understandable in new culture settings. Failing either is to default on the apostolic tradition. Far from implying unbending immobility, apostolicity requires constant adaptation of the primitive aposto.. | christianity evangelism missions the-gospel | Thomas C. Oden | |
| dd0a0e9 | Eternal God, the refuge of all your children, in our weakness you are our strength, in our darkness our light, in our sorrow our comfort and peace. May we always live in your presence, and serve you in our daily lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Boniface FURTHER | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 1e48009 | God has left a trail of language behind a stormy path of historical activities. That language is primarily the evidence with which theology has to deal--first with Scripture, then with a long history of interpretation of Scripture called church history and tradition, and finally with the special language that emerges out of each one's own personal experience of meeting the living God | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| fa1e631 | The theater in which God has chosen to meet rational creatures quietly is the inward realm of conscience, moral reasoning, prayer, and study, especially study of the revealed Word. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 3ab2c8d | the faithful are called through grace to be partakers of God's holiness (Heb. 12), restored to their primordial capacity to reflect, like a mirror, the radical holiness and purity of God, even though their mirroring is always imprecise (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 5.16). | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 2d3f589 | There is no Christian theology without the Bible. There is no Bible without an inspirited community to write, remember, and translate it, to guard it and pass it on, study it, live by it, and invite others to live by it. | Thomas C. Oden | ||
| 1eb876c | The confessor can nullify the exquisitely seasonable moment of confession by talking instead of listening. When he sees pedagogy and advice as more important than simple listening, he diverts the stream of confession. | ministry pastoral-care sin | Thomas C. Oden | |
| 97fa36a | The great variety of moral qualities attributed to God by Scripture revolves particularly around two--holiness and love. These may be said in summary form to constitute the moral character of God | Thomas C. Oden |