We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.
Karl BarthRead
Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of viewing current events through a moral and ethical lens provided by one's faith.
Karl Barth's quote encourages individuals to engage with both spiritual teachings and contemporary news. It suggests that while it is important to stay informed about the world, one should allow their faith—symbolized by the Bible—to guide their understanding and interpretation of what they encounter in the news, thereby promoting a nuanced perspective that aligns with one's values.
In practice
During a sermon on ethics, a pastor might use this quote to encourage congregants to consider how their beliefs influence their views on current events.
We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.
When we speak of our virtues we are competitors, when we confess our sins we become brothers.
Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.
That the zeal for God's honor is also a dangerous passion, that the Christian must bring with him the courage to swim against the tide instead of with it... accept a good deal of loneliness, will perhaps be nowhere so clear and palpable as in the church, where he would so much like things to be different. Yet he cannot and he will not refuse to take this risk and pay this price... he belongs where the reformation of the church is underway or will again be underway.
In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians.
Christian worship is the most momentous, most urgent, most glorious action that can take place in human life.
Where you find the attraction for lust and wealth considerably diminished, to whatever creed he may belong, know that his inner spirit is awakening.
The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.
Which is worse, Risa often wondered, to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted or to silently make then go away before they were even born
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
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