Youth Ministry Initiative

All Citations

Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

2004

From Harold Masback, Be Ye Transformed" (February 22, 2004) at pages 3-5:

I had questions like these when I was in seminary, and I knew just the guy to ask. His name was Shannon Phelps. Shannon’s resume went something like this: fought in Vietnam as a Green Beret, re-upped to serve six years as a Navy Seal, two years in a Chinese Buddhist temple studying martial arts, fifteen years with the CIA operating behind the lines in Laos, Lebanon, Palestine and Afghanistan. After the CIA pulled Shannon out of Afghanistan they sent him to Harvard to study Islam. And there Shannon encountered real change. Because when Shannon got to Harvard, the Holy Spirit got a hold of him and transformed him into a Christian. When I met Shannon, he was at Yale studying to be an Episcopal priest.

Source 
Subjects 

From Allen Hilton:

In Jesus Christ, you and I have been set free…from selfish desires, released from the proud self-sufficiency that kept us from God’s embrace.

Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

2000

From Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, (July 2000) at pp.1-4. 105-106

Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy. [105-106.] For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Source 

From Johan Keppler:

The astronomer who is not devout is mad.

Source 
Subjects 

From Archbishop of Canterbury:

Religious faith is not just a set of private beliefs about supernatural things but a comprehensive ground for reflection on how the world and human life hang together.

Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

2002

From Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (June 14, 2002) vol. 1, at page 352:

Gentlemen, look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that, and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep.

Source 
Subjects 

From Titus Brandsma, quoted in Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: how the Catholic Church determines who becomes a saint, who doesn't, and why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990):

Just before being killed by the Nazis, Dutch priest Titus Brandsma smuggled the following message out of Dachau, I see God in the works of his hands and the marks of his love in every visible thing, and it sometimes happens that I am seized by a supreme joy which is above all other joys.”

Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1920

From Thomas Merton:

What if Trappist monk Thomas Merton had it right when he described the following experience not while praying in his monastery but rather while running errands smack dab in the middle of downtown Louisville, At the corner of Fourth and Walnut in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness . . . There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. There are no strangers! . . . .The gate of heaven is everywhere.”

Source 
Subjects 

From C.S. Lewis:

Unless we discovered we were settling for playing at mud castles on the shore, when all along God was offering us his shimmering kingdom just the other side of the dunes.

Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1920

From Dana Tierney, Coveting Luke's Faith," New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2004, at page 66:

“[O]ver the years I’ve come to feel I’m missing out. My friends and relatives who rely on God – the real believers, not just the churchgoers – have an expansiveness of spirit. When they walk along a stream, they don’t just see water falling over rocks; the sight fills them with ecstasy. They see a realm of hope beyond this world. I just see a babbling brook. I don’t get the message.” Used in “Faith Changes Everything”, January 11, 2004.2004

52 / 90