From John Updike, Baby's First Step", The New Yorker, July 27, 1992:
You land it seemed to him on the shore of your own being in total innocence, like an explorer who was looking for something else, and it takes decades to penetrate inland, and map the mountain passes, and trace the rivers to their sources, even then, there are large blanks, where monsters roam.
From Lowell D. Streiker, Pastor's Complete Handbook of Model Sermons, (Prentice Hall Direct, 1992), at p. 260:
If the Christ is born in Bethlehem a million times, and trudges the dusty roads of Palestine, preaching for a million years, but is not born in your heart and life – and in my heart and life – then what difference does the Gospel make?”
From Paul S. Minear, Matthew: The Teacher's Gospel", at page 39:
As the curtain pulls back we see not Jesus, but rather this “hairy, fantastic scarecrow of a figure clad in camel hair washing down locusts with desert honey, and crying out in the wilderness. He was “a nobody appearing nowhere, talking in scare-language about an ax and fire. To hear him people had to drop everything and go out to the wilderness.” [Paul S. Minear, Matthew: The Teacher’s Gospel, at 39] Even the upstanding people of substance had to forsake all other types of security, confess their sins and join the riffraff of penitents who had nothing to lose and everything to gain.” [Paul S. Minear, Matthew: The Teacher’s Gospel, at 39]
From Richard Neibuhr, Beyond Tragedy at 28-30:
And our sin as a species is that we are forever deluding ourselves that our partial truths are in fact universal truths. We keep forgetting that our lenses are tinted, that our earth bound, creaturely perspective is not in fact the heavenly, divine creator view we can imagine.
1993
From Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC at page 96.
To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’.
1948
From Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, The Yoke of Religion" (1948) at page 96:
As Paul Tillich observed, we know that we are more than dust; and yet we know also that we are going to be dust. We know that we belong to a higher order than that of our animal needs; and yet we know that we shall abuse our powers of imagination and creativity in service of our lower drives. We know that we are only small members of the spiritual world; and yet we act as if we were the center of the universe.
1995
From Harold Masback, 'Freedom From' and 'Freedom For'" (July 2, 1995):
As Luther wrote, “When this emotion of the heart has been set on the right course, the other parts no longer need any commandment; for everything flows out of this disposition of the heart.”
2006
From Circles of Life", April 23, 1995.:
Historian Perry Miller called the Puritan covenant the “master idea of the age for the Congregationalists.” RefMgr field[18]: Cirlces of LIfe
From Harold Masback, Try Another Door" (March 19, 1995):
The headline of a recent edition of USA Today read: “Mind over Matter – Meditation Goes Mainstream.” The story goes on to report how New Age religions have awoken an understanding of the relationship between the mind and body, between mental and physical health. Dr. Harold Benson, who taught at the Harvard Medical School, estimates that stress related interactions between the mind and body account for between 60 and 90% of all doctor visits.