This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Hick, fully John Harwood Hick
To see the world as being ruled by a divine love which sets infinite value upon each individual and includes all men in its scope, and yet to live as though the world were a realm of chance in which each must fight for his own interests against the rest, argues a very dim and wavering vision of God’s rule.
Chance | God | Individual | Love | Men | Rest | Rule | Vision | Wavering | World | Value |
Isidore of Seville, fully Saint Isidore of Seville NULL
Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin. All hope consists in confession. In confession there is a chance for mercy. Believe it firmly. Do not doubt, do not hesitate, never despair of the mercy of God. Hope and have confidence in confession.
Chance | Confidence | Despair | Hope | Mercy | Pardon | Sin |
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
In resentment there is no chance of release but only imprisonment in a painful past and the gradual stifling of all serenity, indeed, of all humanity.
Chance | Humanity | Past | Resentment | Serenity |
Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona
Schools inevitably teach good or bad values in everything they do. Every interaction, whether part of the academic curriculum or the human curriculum of rules, roles, and relationships, has the potential to affect a child’s values and character for good or for ill. The question is not whether to do values education but whether to do it well.
Chance cannot possibly be the origin of things. For it presupposes an encounter of causal series... Chance, that is to say, necessarily implies preordination. to hold that the universe can be explained by a primordial chance is self-contradictory.
The future belongs to those who fuse intelligence with faith, and who with courage and determination grope their way forward from chance to choice, from blind adaptation to creative evolution.
Chance | Choice | Courage | Determination | Evolution | Faith | Future | Intelligence |
Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.
Chance | Mind | Observation |
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re thee to stop the other people… Brick walls are there for reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want something.
The idea of creation expresses the conviction that neither blind chance nor an impersonal mechanical order is behind the existence of the universe. Behind the orderly processes of nature stands the primordial act of God’s concern. There are processes because there was an event of creation.
A Reason, or universal self-consciousness, transcends the awareness of oneself in potential conflict with others, because it consists of awareness of oneself and others as existing in the universal infinite Spirit. Reason sees nature as the expression of the infinite Spirit.
Awareness | Consciousness | Nature | Reason | Self | Spirit | Awareness |
The goal itself cannot be the meaning. It might be a potential cause or source of meaning… the cause of happiness is not what happiness consists in.