This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down...
We human beings are at once delicate and intricate and temporal like the tulips in an April field and sturdy, resilient and enduring as Mt. Rainier when the will inspires us. We are individual miracles, those who live in vegetative states and those w...
The question penetrated, echoed, demanded an answer. It nipped at me in ways I wasn't prepared for, pinched in places I didn't like. Was I really so entrenched in the world I'd been raised in, so set in my ways that I couldn't look beyond the surface...
God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop.
When gangs took over the [abandoned public land in Philadelphia] and the neighborhood took a turn for the worse, horses became a way of saving lives. By getting boys interested in raising a horse rather than killing another human being, these cowboys...
That day, I started taking an interest in the bar's television. We always kept it on. As the hours slid by in a cacophony of talk I kept watch, throwing in the occasional comment about politicians, bankers, show biz personalities as they appeared on ...
The ironic fact is that humanism which began with man's being central eventually had no real meaning for people. On the other hand, if one begins with the Bible's position that man is created by God and in the image of God, there is a basis for that ...
My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking huma...
Even as rowers must subsume their often fierce sense of independence and self-reliance, at the same time they must hold true to their individuality, their unique capabilities as oarsmen or oarswomen or, for that matter, as human beings. p 179
He was in awe of the thirst that people had for someone to tell them that everything was going to be all right. He marveled at the gullibility and vulnerability of his fellow humans. No wonder the churches called them sheep. They were woolly-headed p...
The greatest gift we have ever received, and ever will or could receive, is the Spirit of God Himself. He enters the essence of our human form and changes us from within. He fills us with joy, love and peace. He subdues our passions and transforms ou...
She would never be caught unprepared again, she swore to herself. She would never trust. Never love. Never put faith in other human beings again. She would learn all she could of the shape and substance of the world, and she would find a way to survi...
Let us remember that animals are not mere resources for human consumption. They are splendid beings in their own right, who have evolved alongside us as co-inheritors of all the beauty and abundance of life on this planet
I don't understand why people insist on pitting concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can't they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid package that marries them...
A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can contin...
For women as a class, the ability to transform sexual practice, to achieve respect from men as equal human beings and thus break out of their subordinate status, is undermined by the ability of men to escape from the responsibility of acknowledging w...
It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of...
First, psychotherapy is an art. It is not a science (the human-beings-are-laboratory-rats mentality of the behaviorist notwithstanding). A friend of mine, a philosopher of esthetics, defines art as: anything that people treat as art. So it is with ps...
The feeling, for those seconds, is glorious—it reminds him that he is human, that he is so insignificant as to be utterly free, and he is being guided along gracefully, lovingly, by the hand of Nature—and it frees him, however transiently, from a...
[O]nly the sea is like a human being . . .always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back slowly without having reached, moaning. It is alwa...
Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
