GOD LEADS THE WAY IN SELF-SACRIFICE

'...the way of renunciation is not alien to God. In Jesus, God has been there ahead of us...'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.123.

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.

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.

FAMILY

'Is this not in large measure what it means to belong to a family: to burden each other - and find, almost miraculously, that others are willing, even happy, to carry such burdens? Families would not have the significance they have for us if they did not, in fact, give us claim upon each other. At least in this sphere of life we do not come together as autonomous individuals freely contracting with each other. We simply find ourselves thrown together and asked to share the burdens of life while learning to care for each other...'

Gilbert Meilaender in Dick Keyes, Seeing through Cynicism: A Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion, p.198.