Quotes about Meaning

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. (190)

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the meaning of life.

De moed van het vertrouwen neemt de angst voor het lot even goed als de angst voor de schuld in zich op. Deze moed zegt tot beide: "En toch."Dit is de ware betekenis van de leer der voorzienigheid. Voorzienigheid is geen theorie over zekere handelingen van God, maar het godsdienstig symbool van de moed van het vertrouwen ten aanzien van lot en dood. Want de moed van het vertrouwen zegt zelfs tot de dood: "En toch.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated.

Life sometimes hurts like hell but I've discovered that deleting God from the equation doesn't actually help. It merely removes all meaning and morality from the mess, and all real hope from the future

To be a Christian is to live positively and not destructively, to make ugly things beautiful, and to make chaos meaningful.

Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.

The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not "How does this apply to me?" Rather, it is "What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?

All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not "straight history." There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.

A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story—in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.

Anyway, we don't need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)—at least not without a lot of heavy theological lifting and perhaps a double bourbon. The heavens actually freak me out and make me wonder whether there is a God at all