This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much.
I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other
Experience | Life | Life | Think |
It is far easier to deal with people as problems to be solved than to have anything to do with them in community.
Work | Companionship |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
Just now they kissed, with India coming up close on her toes to see if she could tell yet what there was about a kiss.
If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. There must be an organic unity between past and future lived in the present.
Experience | Feelings | Heart | Little | Need | Past | People | Will | Work | Value |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.
Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |
Pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names still appear on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other Gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasnÂ’t the remotest connection with what the churchÂ’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.
Understanding that life is a journey must take into account the pilgrimages of the Jews. They refreshed their memories of God’s saving ways at the Feast of Passover in the spring; they renewed their commitments as God’s covenantal people at the Feast of the Pentecost in early summer; they responded as a blessed community to the best that God had for them at the Feast of Tabernacles in the autumn. They were a redeemed people, a commanded people, and a blessed people. Every pilgrimage reminded them of their journey with God – past, present, and future.
Theology is about God, and God is Spirit … we have accumulated a lot of experience in the Christian community of persons treating theology as a subject in which God is studied in the ways we are taught to study in our schools—acquiring information that we can use, or satisfying our curiosity, or obtaining qualifications for a job or profession. There are, in fact, a lot of people within and outside formal religious settings who talk and write a lot about spirituality, things of the spirit or the soul or higher things, but are not interested in God. There is a wonderful line in T. H. White’s novel of King Arthur (The Once and Future King), in which Guinevere in her old age becomes the abbess of a convent: ‘she was a wonderful theologian but she wasn’t interested in God.’ It happens.
Children | God | Liberty | People | Rhetoric | Service | Wisdom | Work | Instruction | God |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
A credulous, religious-minded fool, as I've pointed out! And he carried his credulity into the next period of his life, where he believed in one social or philosophical Ism after another, always on the trial of Truth! He was never courageous enough to face what he really knew was true, that there is no truth for men, that human life in unimportant and meaningless. No. He was always grasping at some absurd new faith to find and excuse for going on!
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
Conversation | Hurry | Prayer | Sense | Work |
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, and thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion all in one.
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
We can recognize the absolute transcendence of revelation by the curious fact of the philosophical and theological multiple meanings of the texts of scripture. When St. Thomas was looking for a sed contra for his question on the existence of God, he does not seem to have found a text in which Yahweh says in so many words, “I exist.” So he had recourse to the statement of Exodus: Ego sum qui sum. But that statement is a reply to the question Moses put to God: When the people ask me who has sent me to them, what shall I answer?
Existence | God | Philosophy | Reason | Sacred | Simplicity | Work | God |
ThereÂ’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader, and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if IÂ’d gotten sunburned.
I have my doubts (that the schools will open on time). We have a law case out of Sojourner-Douglass, and at Chesapeake we have all kinds of issues.
Expectation | God | Illusion | Imagination | Meaning | Means | Will | Work | God | Expectation |