Quotes about Engagement

Robbed of its reference to a transcendent spiritual being or substance that nonetheless personally engages with humanity while holding them responsible to its specific directives on how to live, this "love" ("God") has no recourse but to become whatever the current ideology says it is. Currently that means not treating people as different, while liberating them and enabling them to do what they want.

For Christian faith not to be idle in the world, the work of doctors and garbage collectors, business executives and artists, stay-at-home moms or dads and scientists needs to be inserted into God's story with the world. That story needs to provide the most basic rules by which the game in all these spheres is played.

Maybe the world is waiting for you to give yourself to it. Maybe it's only then that things can work themselves out.

There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.

One must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction.

trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves

Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Read anthing, trash or trashier; and listen to thrash. Espceially 83-90 era. They will absorb you. You will be in dire need of beer. Now that's something you must be picky of.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.