It's the hardest thing in the world to put yourself in someone else's place, try to really feel what they feel, figure out why they do the things they do. Especially when it's easier to stick a label on something. Or someone.
But no-one came here to live an ordinary life. Despite what our somnambulistic, mythless society society tells us — a place stuffed to the gilders with unawake, unthinking folk ruled by shoulds, oughts and have-tos; people who have no understanding...
I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is...
In stating these matters, I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accept...
My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like "intersectionality...
A homeless man visited my store today. The few quarters that he had in his pocket he invested on books. I offered him free books, but he insisted on giving me his quarters. He walked away filled with joy as if he possessed the world's riches in his h...
Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere t...
For several centuries, the Celtic church of Ireland was spared the Greek dualism of matter and spirit. They regarded the world with the clear vision of faith. When a young Celtic monk saw his cat catch a salmon swimming in shallow water, he cried, "T...
The beauty of the ragamuffin gospel lies in the insight it offers into Jesus: the essential tenderness of His heart, His way of looking at the world, His mode of relating to you and me. 'If you really want to understand a man, don't just listen to wh...
I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as real...
Perhaps because our culture and politics have gone so off course, with values so contrary to those of Jesus, more and more people intuitively recognize that His vision of God's kingdom-a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace- is the G...
The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to s...
I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quanda...
One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with som...
Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.' 'Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.' 'When are we happy?' 'When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.' 'What is regret?' 'To reali...
The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they�...
We obviously don’t live in a perfect world. If we did, then my dad would never have volunteered for Vietnam so he could use the GI Bill to pay for college, Uncle Google would have more important things to do than searching for eight hundred million...
But I’m old now and Ward has made himself rich and powerful. He has the resources to ensure that one day he’ll perfect his standardising system and if that happens, instead of a thousand Wards there will be a hundred thousand, a million, a billio...
She loved him, and she was going to do everything she could to get him back. She hadn’t come this far just to walk away. He was the love of her life, dammit. The man she wanted to marry. The world had reversed its orbit to bring them back together,...
I get it. I haven't seen much of the real world yet. But let's say I do get out there... and it turns out that it's not even worth seeing? Or even worse.. what if it's so ugly and cruel that I can barely stand to look? What if I only meet idiots and ...
[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous...
