If we can exit a relationship, pressure to reconcile lessens; if we must live with those who have wronged us, we are pushed to reconcile.
Miroslav VolfRead
To affirm that God is God is to want to live in a particular way.
Interpretation
Affirming God's existence leads to a specific way of living aligned with spiritual values.
This quote emphasizes that recognizing God as a supreme being influences how a person chooses to live their life. It suggests that belief in God is not just an intellectual exercise but should manifest in one's actions and lifestyle, guiding decisions, values, and ethics.
In practice
In a sermon about the impact of faith on lifestyle choices.
If we can exit a relationship, pressure to reconcile lessens; if we must live with those who have wronged us, we are pushed to reconcile.
Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.
Love properly understood is Godβthe font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love.
If no one remembers a misdeed or names it publically, it remains invisible. To the observer, its victim is not a victim and its perpetrator is not a perpetrator; both are misperceived because the suffering of the one and the violence of the other go unseen. A double injustice occurs-the first when the original deed is done and the second when it disappears.
There is no space in which worship should not take place, no time when it should not occur, and no activity through which it should not happen.
Some of the worst violence in the world today between estranged religious and ethnic groups happens not on the battlefields. It happens smack in the middle of living rooms and between people who share a lot, who have a lot in common.
Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.
It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, ina government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
It is left... to the juries, if they think the permanent judges are under any bias whatever in any cause, to take on themselves to judge the law as well as the fact. They never exercise this power but when they suspect partiality in the judges; and by the exercise of this power they have been the firmest bulwarks of English liberty.
The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
Idleness is the parent of psychology.
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