The novelist Pearl Buck argued that artists are people who tend to be extremely sensitive to any emotional input: "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them, a touch is a blow, a sound is...
You can be flawed, anxious and sometimes irritated, but don't forget that your life is the greatest company in the world. Only you can prevent her from going into decline. There are many who appreciate, admire and love you. And you don't know but there are people for...
If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.---------------------------------------------------Gender-inclusive paraphrase: If you have people who will...
For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. from The Magnificent Defeat
If it [our framing story] tells us that the purpose of life is for individuals or nations to accumulate an abundance of possessions and to experience the maximum amount of pleasure during the maximum number of minutes of our short lives, then we will have little...
To the Materialist things like nations, classes, civilizations must be more important than individuals, because the individuals live only seventy odd years each and the group may last for centuries. But to the Christian, individuals are more important, for they live...
The truth that the cross of Christ embodies about us is certainly that we are loved by God, but that we are loved as prodigals, as problematic creatures, as beings whose alienation from God, from one another, from ourselves, and from the inarticulate creation is so...
The goal of God's act of grace in Christ is therefore unity among his creatures, a unity which, as this whole discussion has shown, is to become reality in the present in the community of those who acknowledge God's gracious lordship in Christ. If the universal scope...
Worship, in all its grades and kinds, is the response of the creature to the Eternal; nor need we limit this definition to the human sphere. There is a sense in which we may think of the whole life of the Universe, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, as an act...
An emphasis on what we “get out” of a worship service—above all, that we feel good about ourselves—displaces the theocentric praise of God with anthropocentric utilitarianism. Since the worship of God is an end in itself, “making worship useful” destroys it, because...