#iv

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#being #helped #i #life #like

But then again, that's what the Book of Job was about to her, a cautionary tale about wanting there to be a God, wanting there to be someone who could enact what a God could enact, or who could sanction what the Devil would do. You want this, people? You want these kinds of powers? No, you don't, and here's why, and here's why it's sheer vanity to want them in any other entity. Look what sort of violence would rain down. Poor Job, sure, poor Job with his hives and his financial losses — though who needs three thousand camels? — and too bad about the kids, forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold, sure, too bad, but it's God who's the miserable bastard here. Look what he got himself up to! No good could come of that type of power; that's what the writer of the Book of Job was saying, and she knew the writer was right. ↗

— Michelle Latiolais

#god #power #forgiveness

What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture of global capitalism are indispensable. So also is a deeper understanding of the counterideological force of the biblical tradition. But such arguments are no guarantee that the biblical metanarrative will not be co-opted for ideological purposes of violent exclusion, nor do arguments prove the truth of the gospel. Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally implausible. ↗

— Brian J. Walsh

#church #culture #postmodernism #forgiveness

In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down. ↗

— James Wolcott

#chicken #direction #down #easy #edited

This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind's best thoughts, and my soul's triumph over the powers of darkness. ↗

— Isaac Mayer Wise

#book #brink #composed #conceived #constructed

I see no reason why church services have to be standard. I've discussed this with the man who used to be a pastor here at the Methodist Church in Sebastopol. I told him I saw no reason why, on a certain Sunday morning, if a minister has felt during the week the burden of a topic upon his heart and he knows that it is going to take more than the standard twenty minutes to discuss this thing, why he can't rise at the beginning of the service and say 'I have something of special importance this morning so let's sing just one song, and if you'll forgive me, I think I'm going to need about an hour to explain it to you.' I think the congregation would appreciate his candor and give him their attention. If, on the other hand, he does not feel that a definite message has been given him, why not admit it from the pulpit and say, 'This morning, I'm not going to try to make up something to fill the time. We'll sing a few extra hymns and go home!' Why do the services have to begin and end at the same time, and why does everything have to be so rigid? ↗

— Charles M. Schulz

#religion #forgiveness

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves. ↗

— Cliff Fadiman

#great #great ones #kinds #ones #only

The people in general ought to have regard to the moral character of those whom they invest with authority either in the legislative, executive, or judicial branches. ↗

— John Witherspoon

#branches #character #either #executive #general

And then heard Detective Ryan’s pleased voice talking about Eli, about killers who’ve gone free: “They have to tell,” he’d said Well, apparently so. But why? What is it that comes from the telling? Some of it must be relief, of course. A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight. It seems as we need someone to know us as we are—with all we have done—and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please ↗

— Sue Miller

#forgiveness

As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal. ↗

— James Wolcott

#collections #detective #heads #into #labor