Quotes about Reflection

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons.

In my judgment, the church in the United States must now face hard decisions such as we have not faced for a long time. We have indeed bought in as individual persons, even as a church, on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.

We have nearly lost our capacity to think ihcologicafly about public issues and public problems.

Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:

Sabbath is the visible acknowledgment that life is not defined by commoditization.

So in Psalm 73, when life is inequitable, the speaker is aware of a skewed relationship in which one is less than human: When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you. (Ps. 73:21-22; cf. 102:7-8)49

We used to sing the hymn "Take Time to Be Holy." But perhaps we should be singing, "Take time to be human." Or finally, "Take time." Sabbath is taking time … time to be holy … time to be human.

Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest.

Prophetic preaching is dangerous work, not only because it has a subversive edge but because it requires an epistemological break with the assumed world of dominant imagination. This epistemological break makes us aware of our assumptions we have not recognized or reflected upon.

I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.

There is certainly something in angling that tends to produce a serenity of the mind.

It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs, and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave.