A delicate balance is required: keep the penitent tautly close to the point of recognizing sin, and then allow the relief of that pressure to flow through forgiveness. Confession increases this tautness, only to clear the path for release.
The confessor can nullify the exquisitely seasonable moment of confession by talking instead of listening. When he sees pedagogy and advice as more important than simple listening, he diverts the stream of confession.
One trains the eye of confession most closely on what is hurting. If sin is present it will be aching. Confession begins where the raw anguish of conscience is rubbing against the primordial awareness of God's holiness.
If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bil...
We who have turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much he longs to eat with us, to commune with us. He desires a perpetual Eucharistic feast in the inner sanctuary of the heart.
Americans love to hear good things about their bad habits.
You're a leader. It's your job to keep your passion hot. Do whatever you have to do, read whatever you have to read, go wherever you have to go to stay fired up. And don't apologize to anybody.
I do not mean, of course, that we can always accurately express our conscious thoughts with Proustian accuracy. Consciousness overflows language: we perceive vastly more than we can describe.
There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard.
Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there--in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat--things gent freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll.
The linguistic and literary reality of the biblical tradition is folkloristic in essence. The concept of a benei Israel ... is a reflection of no sociopolitical entity of the historical state of Israel of the Assyrian period
CURIOSITY DEMANDS THAT WE ASK QUESTIONS, THAT WE TRY TO PUT THINGS TOGETHER AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS MULTITUDE OF ASPECTS AS PERHAPS RESULTING FROM THE ACTION OF A RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF ELEMENTAL THINGS AND FORCES ACTING IN AN INFINITE VARIETY...
The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.
* Recognize that God is with you. * Acknowledge God knows what He's doing. * Search for God's will: the path He desires you to take in life. * Consider what God did for you when He sent Jesus to die on the cross (forgiveness and righteousness)
...there is still a need for those of us nestled deep within the Christian bubble to look beyond the status quo and critically assess the degree to which we are really living biblically.
God did not become flesh and suffer an ignominious death at our hands so that we could have sprawling church campuses, programs, and budgets.
So many people, if the truth were known, live their lives on two levels. The principles they fight about are often at odds with the complicated and often frustrated lives they live. This is why there is so much intensity.
The man who attempts Christianity without the church shoots himself in the foot, shoots his children in the leg, and shoots his grandchildren in the heart.
This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.
Many ritually abusive cults deliberately divide the personality system down the middle of the head, making sure that there is no communication between the two sides. “Left side" parts might be instructed to speak to no one other than the perpetrato...
Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.
