1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
7693
7694
7695
7696
7697
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e01dd9b | How can it be that God is known in only one religion--and then perhaps only in the "right" form of that religion?7" | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| c5e7538 | That Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads--as if "believing the right things" is what God is most looking for, as if having "correct beliefs" is what will save us. And if you have "incorrect beliefs," you may be in trouble. It's remarkable to think that God cares so much about "beliefs." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 3eca79d | Moreover, when you think about it, faith as belief is relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things and still be relatively unchanged. Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 0db1e59 | Growth in faith as trust casts out anxiety. Who of us would not want a life with less anxiety, to say nothing of an anxiety-free life? If we were not anxious, can you imagine how free we would be, how immediately present we would be able to be, how well we would be able to love? Faith as radical trust has great transforming power. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 396d86d | In this life, a radical centering in God leads to a deepening trust that transforms the way we see and live our lives. Seeing, living, trusting, and centering are all related in complex ways. They are all matters of the heart, and not primarily of the head. And in our deaths, dying means trusting in the buoyancy of God, that the one who has carried us in this life is the one into whom we die. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 0080e86 | I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 9e4d46d | metaphor means "to see as." Metaphorical language is a way of seeing. To apply this to the Bible: the Bible not only includes metaphorical language and metaphorical narratives, but may itself be thought of as a "giant" metaphor. The Bible as metaphor is a way of seeing the whole: a way of seeing God, ourselves, the divine-human relationship, and the divine-world relationship. And the point is not to "believe" in a metaphor--but to "see" wit.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 6c0a22e | The human products of bread and wine become a means of grace, earthen vessels whereby the sacred becomes present to us. So also the Bible is sacrament, a human product whereby God becomes present to us. Its words become a means whereby the Spirit speaks to us in the present. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 1ccf42d | The image of Jesus I have sketched in the preceding chapters is quite different from the popular image of Jesus, the Jesus many of us have met before. His own self-understanding did not include thinking and speaking of himself as the Son of God whose historical intention or purpose was to die for the sins of the world, and his message was not about believing in him. Rather, he was a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and moveme.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| e176e09 | Jesus, then, was not just a prophet announcing the kingdom. He believed that the kingdom was breaking in to Israel's history in and through his own presence and work. This is the third layer of my historical portrait of his mission and message. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| acc939b | Jesus was offering forgiveness to all and sundry, out there on the street, without requiring that they go through the normal channels. That was his real offense. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 8442a40 | Jesus was challenging his contemporaries to live as the new covenant people, the returned-from-exile people, the people whose hearts were renewed by the word and work of the living God. Call Jesus a "social prophet" if you will; but his social prophecy grew directly out of his sense of what time it was. His critique of, and warning to, his contemporaries, and his challenge to a different way of being Israel, were based on his firm belief th.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| de9a24e | All this means that we can add a fourth stroke to our historical portrait of Jesus. He was a first-century Jewish prophet, announcing God's kingdom, believing that the kingdom was breaking in through his own presence and work, and summoning other Jews to abandon alternative kingdom visions and join him in his. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 6d0831a | Many have traditionally read Jesus' sayings about judgment either in terms of the postmortem condemnation of unbelievers or of the eventual destruction of the space-time world. The first-century context of the language in question, however, indicates otherwise. Jesus was warning his contemporaries that if they did not follow his way, the way of peace and forgiveness, the way of the cross, the way of being the light of the world, and if they.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 8e14cf0 | Thus, a fifth stroke in the sketch. Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God, believing that this kingdom was inaugurated with his own work, summoning others to join him in his kingdom movement, and warning of dire consequences for the nation, for Jerusalem, and for the temple, if his summons was ignored. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 8999b09 | Jesus was not "attacking Judaism" but telling his fellow Jews that their moment had come and that they were in danger of missing it. He was not criticizing Jewish religion and offering a different variety, but appealing to Israel's own story and foundation texts to criticize what he saw as deep corruption both within the Jewish society of his day and in widespread Jewish attitudes toward the rest of the world. He stood, in other words, with.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 8ab6ff2 | He was not, then, in any shape or form, anti-Jewish. Jesus clearly knew that there was a wide spectrum of belief and practice among his contemporaries; nevertheless, like the biblical prophets before him, he denounced "the nation" for its widespread rejection of what he saw as God's will, and its embracing of ways of being Jewish which he regarded as unwarranted, disloyal to YHWH, and disastrous. The prophets had spoken out against the nati.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 882f00c | In particular, Jesus' clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because his kingdom agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 5da71d7 | The sixth stroke of my sketch is therefore as follows: Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not. His agendas led him into a symbolic clash with those who embraced other ones, and this, together with the positive symbols of his own kingdom agenda, point to the way in which he saw his inaugurated kingdom moving toward acco.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 68d6223 | As I follow this path, I discover a Jesus who was not simply an example, even the supreme example, of a mystic or Spirit person, such as one might meet, in principle, in other cultures. I find, rather, the Jesus I have just been describing: Jesus as a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not, doing all this in symbolic actions, and .. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| a80b41f | Technically speaking, that means there was a lot of wee and poo in it.) | David Walliams | ||
| a2ff190 | This picture, I believe, makes very good sense historically. Jesus' critique of his contemporaries was critique from within; his summons was not to abandon Judaism and try something else, but to become the true, returned-from-exile people of the one true God. He aimed to be the means of God's reconstitution of Israel. He would call into being the true, returned-from-exile Israel. He would challenge, and deal with, the evil that had infected.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 17f23c3 | Jewish mystic and Christian messiah describe how I see Jesus before and after Easter. To use language from my previous chapter, I see the pre-Easter Jesus as the former and the post-Easter Jesus as the latter. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 5b21b3e | Our culture's secular wisdom does not affirm the reality of the Spirit; the only reality about which it is certain is the visible world of our ordinary experience. Accordingly, it looks to the material world for satisfaction and meaning. Its dominant values are what I call the three A's-achievement, affluence, and appearance. We live our lives in accord with these values, with both our self-worth and level of satisfaction dependent upon how.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 79a76b1 | The phrase "kingdom of God" (and such similar reverential phrases as "kingdom of heaven") denoted, not a place where God ruled, but rather the fact that God ruled--or, rather, that he soon would rule, because he certainly was not doing so at present in the way he intended to do." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 96cbe2c | The coming kingdom of God was not, then, a matter of abstract ideas or timeless truths. It was not about a new sort of religion, a new spiritual experience, a new moral code (or new strength to observe existing ones). It was not a doctrine or a soteriology (a systematic scheme for individual salvation or a general statement about how one might go to heaven after death). It was not a new sociological analysis, critique, or agenda. It was abo.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 19cef26 | Jesus was telling his contemporaries that the kingdom was indeed breaking into history, but that it did not look like what they had expected. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 8440a7b | The goal in Japan is not to isolate the criminal from society, but precisely the opposite. A convict is sent back to his neighborhood, family, and job so that the social pressure to fit in and the pain of being shamed before the group will lead him to go straight. | T.R. Reid | ||
| df0648f | But Nikki White was a citizen of the world's richest country, the United States of America. | T.R. Reid | ||
| 5a17ec4 | The warmth and the soft glow of the tubes also attracted moths, which would fly through ENIAC's innards and cause short circuits. Ever since, the process of fixing computer problems has been known as debugging. | T.R. Reid | ||
| 5e82d21 | It's one of the finest highway networks in the world--and nobody seems to care that the basic idea was copied from the Nazis.6 EISENHOWER, | T.R. Reid | ||
| 4051735 | It's classic: Congress decides to reduce the complexity of our tax code by making it even more complex. | T.R. Reid | ||
| d68ea74 | When I was traveling the world on my quest, I asked the health ministry of each country how many citizens had declared bankruptcy in the past year because of medical bills. Generally, the officials responded to this question with a look of astonishment, as if I had asked how many flying saucers from Mars landed in the ministry's parking lot last week. How many people go bankrupt because of medical bills? In Britain, zero. In France, zero. I.. | T.R. Reid | ||
| f2ae037 | All the watchmaker needs is a mechanism to count the back-and-forth oscillations--and counting is one of the simple tasks that binary logic gates can perform. In the digital watch a logic gate called a JK flip-flop counts the vibrations of the crystal. | T.R. Reid | ||
| 314ce28 | Japan has the oldest population in the world, and the Japanese go to the doctor more than anybody--about fourteen office visits per year, compared with five for the average American. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person on health care each year; we burn through $7,400 per person. | T. R. Reid | ||
| 1bf4ae1 | Beveridge] was a driven man, right to the end; his last words, enunciated clearly from his death bed at the age of eighty-four, showed that the aging social reformer was still haunted by the memory of those sick men on the East London streets. 'I have a thousand things to do,' he said, and died. | medical | T.R. Reid | |
| 6e145a1 | For the mass prevention of disease, mass education is a key weapon. | T.R. Reid | ||
| 2c881e0 | Switzerland, and the Netherlands, any resident can choose any insurance plan on the market--and change to a new plan on short notice. That's a wider choice of health insurance than any American has. | T.R. Reid | ||
| 1c0c47d | We've wasted our shining medical assets because of a health care payment system--or, more precisely, a crazy quilt of several overlapping and often conflicting systems--that prevents millions from receiving the treatment they need and that undermines the quality of care for millions more. | T.R. Reid | ||
| db60846 | The shortcomings of our system can be grouped into three basic problems: coverage, quality, and cost. | T.R. Reid | ||
| b390f90 | But out of twenty-three wealthy countries, the American health care system ranks dead last when it comes to keeping newborns alive. | T.R. Reid | ||
| 8af59b4 | Some are rich and some are poor. Some are beautiful, some aren't. Some are brilliant, some aren't. But when we get sick--then, everybody is equal. Everybody must have equal right to the best medical treatment we can provide. | T.R. Reid | ||
| 69f7c9f | The "Tax Complexity Lobby," as Forbes magazine called it, includes tax-preparation firms like H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt, as well as companies that make tax-preparation software" | T.R. Reid | ||
| 2bd878e | Internal Revenue Service: "If you determined your tax in the earlier year by using the Schedule D Tax Worksheet, or the Qualified Dividends and Capital Gain Tax Worksheet, and you receive a refund in 2016 of a deduction claimed in that year, you will have to recompute your tax for the earlier year to determine if the recovery must be included in your income." | T.R. Reid |