IF YOU WANT TO BELONG YOU NEED TO PARTICIPATE

'...our sense of belonging is all about participation. We belong because we are part of the work of this place.' 

James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life, p.146. 

HONEST PARENTING

'When we share our own vulnerabilities with our children, we send a powerful message to their brains that they are not alone in their own weakness.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.153. 

"JUST DO YOU BEST!"

'...possibly one of the least helpful things a parent can tell his or her child is "We only expect you to do your best." No one can do his or her best at everything, for no one has that much time and energy.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.151.

"THEY'RE NO TROUBLE!"

'The potential downside to never having anything to do with trouble in your family is the possibility that your family never suspects that trouble ever has anything to do with you.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.116.

HELL

'...is the counter echo of God's mandate that it is not good to be alone.'
Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.114.

OUR DESIRE TO BE DESIRED

'...all sin, all idolatry, all coping strategies in which I indulge are ways for me to satiate my hunger for relationship, my longing to be known and loved, my desire to be desired.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves, p.105. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF INTUITION

'...the criticism of religion that derides its central intuition as a projection of human fears and desires onto a universe that is alien to such things is itself a projection of human influences, deductions, and expectations onto a universe that is wholly incommensurate with them.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.220. 

THE LIMITS OF RATIONALISM

'I wish only to say one more time that the rationalistic arguments that claim to winnow out the implausible and the meaningless by applying the flail of common sense are products of bad education. Religions are expressions of the sound human intuition that there is something beyond being as we experience it in this life. What is often described as a sense of the transcendent might in some cases be the intuition of the actual. So the religions are quite right to conceptualize it in terms that exceed the language of common sense. The rationalists are like travelers in a non-English-speaking country who think that they can make themselves understood by shouting. Sadly, too many religious have abandoned their own language, its beauty and subtlety and power, accommodating to the utilitarian expectations of those demanding outsiders who have no understanding of the language or culture and refuse on principle to acquire any. But the unfathomable has a most legitimate place in any conceptualization of an unfathomable reality.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.212. 

THE CENTRALITY OF THE TRINITY

'Is there are great Christian theology that does not have the Trinity at its center? Does the highest sense of the sacred abide where the Trinity as a concept is isallowed? Well, I think not, for what it's worth.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.210. 

THE CIVILIZED MAN?

'Robert Birley, headmaster of Eton when I arrived there in 1959, defined a civilized man as someone who might be the chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority and capable of following the the second lesson at Evensong in the Greek.' 

William Waldegrave, A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir, p.34.