To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies are responsible for the farts which shame us, tiny monsters shitting in their billions all over our pure skin create the acid reek of "our" sweat. And S...
Baumauer sits at home in silence in the evenings planning how to impress his rigidly strict father who’s in his late seventies, but who still enforces the same dynamic between himself and his three, guilt-ridden sons as he did when they were childr...
One must consider that small children are virtually incapable of making much impact on their world. No matter what path taken as a child, survivors grow up believing they should have done something differently. Perhaps there is no greater form of sur...
Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also enta...
It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, ph...
Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our wil...
Flow with the go! If you want to experience the magnificence of the Universe in your life accept where you are, own it, take responsibility for it. Then release the old hurt, guilt, wrongs, mistakes as well as your future worries and stress. Finally ...
Dalton Russell: I'm no martyr. I did it for the money. But it's not worth much if you can't face yourself in the mirror. Respect is the ultimate currency. I was stealing from a man who traded his away for a few dollars. And then he tried to wash away...
Henri Ducard: You have learned to bury your guilt with anger. I will teach you to confront it, and to face the truth. You know how to fight six men. We can teach you how to engage six hundred. You know how to disappear. We can teach you to become tru...
There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of...
I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the s...
The recasting of the Origin Myth as a story about the perils of disobedience precipitated a kind of decoupling of scripture from religious experience: when religious authorities began to insist on the literal truth of scripture, they were effectively...
We read about the name Jesus was given at his birth; Immanuel, meaning “God with us”. This God wasn’t content with dwelling in fiction, this God wasn’t content living with the seraphim and this God wasn’t content with bulls and goats anymor...
-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding h...
If Roman Catholic Christianity has always struggled with the threat of works righteousness, Reformed Protestantism has always struggled with the threat of cheap grace. For many, if not the majority of Protestants, God's love and acceptance do not lea...
Catholic missionaries labored earnestly to convert indians. They fervently believed that God expected them to save the Indians' souls by convincing them to abandon their old sinful beliefs and to embrace the one true Christian faith. But after baptiz...
[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced b...
[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Prote...
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by ...
My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a "plan" for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we wer...
Let us forget that we are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, or Free-thinkers, and remember only that we are men and women. After all, man and woman are the highest possible titles. All other names belittle us, and show that we have, to ...
