From Martin Luther:
God’s grace is unmerited and unconditional. We need not and cannot earn it. But Luther also taught that we can at least watch for grace; we can wait for grace; we can pray for grace; and we can keep our eyes glued on the cross of Christ.
From Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Western Religion, Psychotherapists or the Clergy" (1984) at pages 207-208:
Anyone who uses modern psychology to look behind the scene not only of his patients’ lives but more espeically of his own life – and the modern psychotherapist must do this if he is not to be merely an unconscious fraud – will admit that to accept himself in all his wretchedness is the hardest of tasks, and one which it is almost impossible to fulfill. The very thought can make us sweat with fear acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ – all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself – that these are within me and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved – what then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide from the world, we deny every having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed
From A Beautiful Mind":
Mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. tells his psychiatrist that his schizophrenia is just a problem to be solved and he will work out a solution to his illness the way he works out solutions to mathematical equations. But as his psychiatrist tells him, “the mind cannot work out the solution when the illness is in the mind itself.”
From Mary Pipher, quoting Bill Moyers in the article, Surviving Toxic Media: How the Church Can Help", UUA World Magazine, (January/February 1998):
Our children are being raised by appliances.
From Judy Mann, quoting Armand Nicholi of Harvard University, Who Taught These 'Men' to Be Men?" The Washington Post:
A Harvard University study found American parents spend less time with their children than parents of any other country except Great Britain.
1974
From Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner, from an article in Scientific American (August, 1974):
Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University wrote an article in Scientific American (August, 1974) in which he reported a study on parenting. One of his conclusions came in these words, The demands of a job that claims mealtimes, evenings and weekends as well as days; the trips and moves necessary to get ahead or simply to hold one’s own; the increasing time spent commuting, entertaining, going out, meeting social and community obligations – all these produce a situation in which a child often spends more time with a babysitter than with a participating parent.” He gives one of the outcomes of a study that justifies that conclusion. He wrote, “Compare…the results of a study of middle class fathers who told university interviewers that they were spending an average of 15-20 minutes a day playing with their one year old infants with another study in which the father’s voice was actually recorded by means of a microphone attached to the infant’s shirt. The data indicated that fathers spend relatively little time interacting with their infants. The mean number of interactions per day was 2.7, and the average number of seconds per day was 37.7.” (ibid) But see contrasting data in Michael Ventura’s article, “The Psychology of Money,” Psychology Today, March/April 1995 which states, “fathers spend less than 10 minutes a week in conversation with their children; and that 20 percent of their teenagers haven’t talked to either parent for more than 10 minutes in the last month.”; Kelemen, Lawrance, “To Kindle a Soul”, chapter 4, “Love, Attention and Affection”, p.
121 quoting Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia,” p.
80 “The average U.S. teenager speaks seven minutes a day with his mother and five minutes a day with his father”; Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey 2003 findings: Adult women in households with children under age 18 spent about 1.7 hours providing childcare as their primary activity. Adult men in such households spent 0.8 hour (about 50 minutes).] A Cornell University Study found fathers average only 38 seconds a day being totally attentive to their children’s needs and 20 minutes a week being partially attentive”
2001
From The American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education, Sexuality, Contraception, and the Media," January 2001 quoted on the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families website, www.nationalcoalition.org:
See also Kelemen, Lawrence, “To Kindle a Soul”, p.169 quoting Akst, Daniel, “The Culture of Money: Caught with Their Pants On.” The New York Times, March 7, 1999, and Clarke-Pearson, “Children-Violence-Solutions,”
265-68, North Carolina Medical Journal 58 (19970.]—By the time an adolescent graduates from high school they will have spent 15,000 hours watching television compared to just 12,000 hours in the classroom.
3,000 of those television hours will have been commercials. Date of Input: 10/06/2005
Priority: Normal
From Thornton Wilder's play, The Skin of Our Teeth:
Mr. Antrobus acknowledges his faults to his wife. Calmly, almost dramatically, Mrs. Antrobus replies: I didn’t marry you because you were perfect…I married you because you gave me a promise.” She takes off her ring and looks at it. “That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine.”