HOW IDENTITY POLITICS FRAGMENTS

'...attaching the individual self to a fixed definition of a group self - and the group definition subsequently becoming entrenched - can lead to polarisation and even extremism. If you depend on a solid group identity to find individual stability, any questioning of that group also causes individual agony; identity is deeply emotional. And so, if a group's identity is challenged - as British national identity has been, for example, in the past few decades of increased immigration and globalisation - it fragments into the new version and a more stubbornly held iteration of the old, which enables individuals within the group to maintain their own sense of self. It follows that each old version becomes increasingly extreme or more concentrated. This is not just because it is smaller, but because the individuals within it pour in the same emotional significance they once did to the larger group: a narrower definition of the collective self is given the same weight.'

Emily Bootle, This Is Not Who I Am: Our Authenticity Obsession, p.84.

FEARING GOD

'To fear God is to no longer assert self. To fear God is to give up not only the need to master all threats but the drive to know all answers. To fear God is to trust that it is better to have him without answers than to have answers without him.'

Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough, p.194.

WHERE ENJOYMENT POINTS US

'...in God's world, enjoyment is a clue to reality's deepest, brightest secret: that the universe is the gleeful invention of unassailably happy God.'

Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough, p.132.

OUR DERANGED AGE

'You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth - and who are luckily exempt from depression - would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientfic and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he or what he is doing.'

Walker Percy in Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Not Enough, p.116.

A COSMIC IRONY

'The modern objective consciousness will go to any length to prove that it is not unique in the Cosmos, and by this effort establishes its own uniqueness.'

Walker Percy in Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Not Enough, p.113.

WE ARE COSMIC MISFITS

'God has made us cosmic misfits.'
Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes' Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness, p.71.

MIDDLE-AGE

'One of the disconcerting aspects of middle age was the realization that most of the crises which happened to other people also ultimately happened to you.'

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners, p.44.

THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY WRONG EXPECTATIONS

'Trauma in reponse to disaster often stems from the unbiblical fiction that the world is, and ought to be experienced as, all right. To declare it instead sick, "a vale of tears", is not pessimistic. It is to own that the world needs saving still; that Easter is not a past event, but present; that is our life, our joy and our hope depend on it. Only in paradise, when we are home at last, with Jesus, will God make all crying case. For now, we eat our fill from his table as wanderers, his bread, seasoned with our tears.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.169.

THE VERY FACE OF GOD

 'When the Blessed Virgin, having given birth, looked into this face, she enjoyed a privilege no woman or man had known since Adam and Eve before the fall, still robed in glory.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.143.

GOD'S ACTIVE HANDS

'Theology teaches that God's hands were never more active than when fastened to the wood of the tree, "puntured by nails", causing blood to flow "as the price of a great salvation". This is a lesson to be pondered often and in silence.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.74.