This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is the Christian hope that to life lived in the presence of God. Death is but the entrance into a larger life. It is the Christian hope that in the larger fellowship of God’s sons for time and eternity there is no final separation from those we love. It is the Christian hope that whether life comes early or late, no life is fruitless, no personality prized by God as an infinitely precious creation is snuffed out like a candle in the dark.
Death | Eternity | God | Hope | Life | Life | Love | Personality | Time | God |
Understanding religious differences makes for a better understanding of other differences and for an appreciation of the sacredness of human personality as basic to human freedom.
Appreciation | Better | Freedom | Personality | Understanding | Appreciation |
If no charismatic emerges, people may be truly bereft and lost in a sea of forces and pressures beyond their adaptive capacity. The society may die. If someone does emerge, the people may understandably attribute his rise to “divine grace.” Indeed, if he exercises leadership, he may well save his community and help it to renew itself. First, he binds people together by powerfully articulating their values, hopes, and pains. Second, he weaves their hopes into some image of the future. And third, he provides energy, strategy, and faith that the vision can be realized.
Capacity | Energy | Faith | Future | Grace | People | Society | Vision | Society |
Stanley Hoffmann and Inge Hoffmann
It is only in the depths of crisis and despair that the fear of losing one’s personality breeds millennial hopes of rescue: otherwise, complacency prevails.
Complacency | Despair | Fear | Personality | Crisis |
P. A. R. Janet and G. Sèailles
The law of duty demands moral perfection or holiness. But this is impossible in our present life, therefore it can only be attained by an indefinite progress, and this progress is only possible under the hypothesis of an existence and a personality that re indefinitely prolonged.
Duty | Existence | Hypothesis | Law | Life | Life | Perfection | Personality | Present | Progress |
Philosophy is only a matter of passionate vision rather than of logic - logic only finding reasons for the vision afterwards.
Logic | Philosophy | Vision |
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
Any conflict which prevents the personality from attaining wholeness is a hindrance: all taboos against considering any part of the universe in relation to man and his destiny are hindrances; so, too, are all restrictions upon the free use of reason, or the free appeal of conscience. In other words, any religion which is not an affirmation of the ultimate value of truth and knowledge, beauty and its expression, and goodness and moral action, which ever sets itself up against these, is in that respect a false, low and incomplete religion.
Action | Beauty | Conscience | Destiny | Knowledge | Man | Personality | Reason | Religion | Respect | Truth | Universe | Wholeness | Words | Respect | Beauty | Value |
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 |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
To be constantly without desire is the way to have a vision of the mystery of heaven and earth, for constantly to have desire is the means by which their limitations are seen.
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
Because Release is a gift – a reality not earned, not merited, not attained in any way – there flows naturally from the experience of release, the experience of Gratitude. Gratitude can best be defined and understood as the only possible response to a gift, to something recognized as utterly, freely given. Gratitude is the vision – the way of seeing – that recognizes “gift.”
Experience | Gratitude | Reality | Vision |
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false, and the false with the true.
Hate | Man | Objectivity | Personality | Sense | Ugly | Unity |
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
Happiness – the joy of living – comes in the experience of gratitude that flows forma vision of one’s life as a reality received, a gift given freely and spontaneously. Such a vision removes self from the center, thus healing self-centeredness by revealing the folly of the illusion of control.
Control | Experience | Folly | Gratitude | Illusion | Joy | Life | Life | Reality | Self | Vision |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Without necessity nothing budges, the human personality least of all. It is tremendously conservative, not to say torpid. Only acute necessity is able to rouse it. The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command, no insight, only brute necessity.
Insight | Necessity | Nothing | Personality |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
The primordial experience is the source of [creativity]… In itself it offers no words or images, for it is a vision seen “as in a glass, darkly.” It is merely a deep presentiment that strives to find expression. It is like a whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and, by carrying it aloft, assume a visible shape.
Creativity | Experience | Vision | Words |