We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounter...
The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to...
In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only ...
Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy ...
Professor Lupin: Why do you look so miserable, Harry? Harry: None of it made any difference. Pettigrew escaped. Professor Lupin: Didn't make any difference? Harry, it made all the difference in the world! You helped discover the truth. You saved an i...
There is a fundamental tension between science and freedom - no matter how science is viewed by its practitioners nor how freedom is sensed by those who believe they have it.
At its most basic, the allure of fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, liberal or conservative, is that it provides an appealing order to things that are actually disorderly.
The human quest for justice is an expression of the moral content of the fundamental laws of physics, which reveals itself in the search for a supreme law and a supreme lawmaker.
The failure of so many marriages is due to their getting married out of animal passion and not out of love.
The day you stop learning is the day you begin to die. Lack of knowledge is the fundamental principle for killing "alive and kicking" dreams.
People have been bred to hate for generations -- eons, maybe. Some fundamental urge. Something implicit in the human condition.
But there's something fundamentally wrong in a system where a girl like Meredith would even consider staying with a boy like Dylan if she has the chance to be free of him.
Cinema isn't just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It's specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age mov...
It is a fundamental misperception," Fouts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.
But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.
Open scatter is more fundamental than coupled sharing; it is the stuff from which, on splendid occasions, dialogue may arise.
I believe that the ability to laugh at oneself is fundamental to the resiliency of the human spirit.
It is hard to talk about a middle ground for something that is a fundamental right.
I wondered if all a person could hope for was illusion and luck, for I was forced to conclude that the world was fundamentally and appallingly dangerous. It is a lesson I will never forget.
