Great Throughts Treasury

"Most newspaper headlines are more effective examples of man’s sin writ large than any book on theology can ever hope to be."

"A total being who can do many different things - think, fight, remember, love, anticipate, copulate, sing, laugh, imagine. All the activities can be used for good ends, all can be abused and turned to evil ends."

"And I wanted to cry out at her that I could not put the body apart from the soul, and that the comfort of her body was more than a thing of the flesh, but was also a comfort of the soul, and why it was I could not say, and why it should be, I could not say, but there was in it nothing that was ugly or evil, but only good. But how can one find such words?"

"How does one keep from growing old inside? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people?. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable."

"God is not only a listening God but a responding God who acts."

"Observermanship is the art of giving the impression that you are with it even though you don't know Latin very well."

"Prayer for many is like a foreign land. When we go there, we go as tourists. Like most tourists, we feel uncomfortable and out of place. Like most tourists, we therefore move on before too long and go somewhere else."

"One important aspect of justice, Jose Miranda reminds us, involves the restoration of what has been stolen. Giving food to the hungry or clothing to the naked is not a charitable handout but an exercise in simple justice - restoring to the poor what is rightfully theirs, what has been taken from them unjustly."

"That we must never forgive would seem to follow from the same stern logic. For if we forgive, it will be a sign to those in the future that they can act without fear of punishment, and that the world has a moral escape valve labeled 'forgiveness' that permits evil not only to survive but to thrive... Forgiveness becomes a 'weak' virtue, one that Christians seem particularly prone to champion, and one that always carries the possibility of condoning, rather than constricting, the spread of evil. [regarding the Holocaust]"

"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today."

"The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture."

"True patriotism is not worship of our nation but rather, in the light of our worship of the God of justice, to conform our nation's ways of justice."