This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Douglas Meeks, also M. Douglas Meeks
The mystery of idolatry is that persons reflect what they possess. Idolatry is being possessed by a possession and thereby refusing God’s claim on oneself and shirking one’s responsibility toward others in the community.
God | Mystery | Responsibility |
To serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor.
Decision | God | Love | Responsibility | God |
To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you.
This is the essence of humanism: we have the privilege and responsibility to consider deep questions and to courageously bear the answers and the difficulty in finding solid answers. In doing so, one can aspire to one’s chosen values, and hopefully find fulfillment in the process.
Difficulty | Fulfillment | Responsibility | Privilege |
O. Hobart Mowrer, fully Orval Hobart Mowrer
Is there no such thing as moral responsibility and social accountability at all? Is every mean or vicious thing that you or I as ordinary individuals do, not sin, but rather as expression of “illness”? Who would seriously hold that a society could long endure which consistently subscribed to this flaccid doctrine?
Doctrine | Responsibility | Sin | Society | Society |
Organized religion is too respectable, too much at home in America, and so too much inclined to abdicate its responsibility as a judge of society.
Religion | Responsibility | Society |
Behind all faith... lies the plain fact that man, as a creature of free will, cannot shirk the ultimate responsibility for his own fate.
We have not so much the privilege of intelligence, viewed as something above and against nonhuman nature, but the responsibility and necessity to convert our intelligence to the earth. We need to learn how to use intelligence to mend the distortions we have created and how to convert intelligence into an instrument that can cultivate the harmonies and balances of the ecological community and bring these to a refinement.
Earth | Intelligence | Nature | Necessity | Need | Refinement | Responsibility | Learn | Privilege |
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
There are many things children accept as “grown-up things” over which they have no control and for which they have no responsibility – for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents’ decision to live apart.
Cause | Children | Control | Decision | Need | Parents | Responsibility |
John Robinson, fully John Arthur Thomas Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich
Prayer is the responsibility to meet others with all I have, to be ready to encounter the unconditional in the conditional, to expect to meet God in the way, not to turn aside from the way.
God | Prayer | Responsibility | God |
Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist
The ability to accept responsibility is the measure of the person.
Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Tolle
If you can neither enjoy nor bring acceptance to what you do – stop. Otherwise, you are not taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness. And if you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life.
Acceptance | Consciousness | Life | Life | Responsibility |
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.
Contradiction | Responsibility | Work | Leadership |
We believe that humanity stands at the threshold of its next great leap. However, our success in making this transition depends on our willingness to develop a greater vision and a clearer sense of responsibility for one another. Understanding and articulating the nature and dynamics of consciousness is key to achieving this new vision.
Consciousness | Humanity | Nature | Responsibility | Sense | Success | Understanding | Vision |
When you take responsibility for your actions, you give yourself immeasurable power.
Power | Responsibility |
Authority can be delegated. Responsibility cannot.