FROM CHURCH CHOIRS TO WORLD WARS

'The historian Herbert Butterfield is supposed to have said that if we take the animosity present in an average church choir and give that animosity a history by extending it over time, we will have an adequate explanation of all the wars ever fought in human history.'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.64.

SIN IS INGRATITUDE

'Radically and basically all sin is simply ingratitude.'
Karl Barth in Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.56

WHAT SEXUAL ETHICS ARE ALL ABOUT

'...a "crisis" in sexual ethics is never simply that; it is a crisis in our understanding of what it means to be a person. Are we beings characterized most of all by will and choice, beings who confer meaning and value on our acts by our choices? Or are we beings who discover meaning and value in the embodied life God has created? Because the latter is the truth, the church can offer to the world something more hopeful than the idea that what is good depends largely on our own choosing.'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done: The Ten Commandments and the Christian Life, p.21.

WHAT CHILDREN SENSE

'Unconsciously, everyone under the age of ten knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocriosy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty.'

Mavis Gallant, 'The Doctor' in The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories, p.173.