I believe that God made the world, set humans in responsibility over it, and chooses to communicate to us the nature of moral goodness and a rightly ordered world — even if sometimes it seems a distant dream. from After Evangelicalism
Socrates famously declared that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ It is one of the most quoted classical sayings outside the Bible, but it is followed less than it is quoted. And if Socrates is correct, it would mean that many people, even highly educated...
I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles. Nature, the psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfolded and what more could I wish for?
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass--grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. We need silence to be able to touch souls....
Use the things of this world as nature needs them, but not with excessive attachment. For it would be very displeasing to God if you were to set your heart on something of less value than yourself. That would be nothing but a surrender of your dignity.
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking...
We are neither big nor small but what we are in the eyes of God, and as long as we surrender ourselves totally then God can use us. The emptier we are, the more room we give God to fill us. Even God cannot put anything into what is already full. By ourselves we may be...
God by nature recruits outsiders to be partners in providence, makes a home among them, and through them enriches the world. We miss out on this fullness of life when we limit our partnerships to those who most resemble ourselves.
Imago dei, the image of God… We resemble God in our capacity to love, to reason, to feel, to relate to other creatures, to imagine, to plan, to create, to contemplate, and in many other ways. We are an image of God. A scratched-up one, badly damaged by sin, but the...