The only real cure for provincialism is not dictated by our awareness of the size and diversity of the human family alone, but also by our awareness of the staggering size and diversity of the more-than-human community of nature.

George B. Handley - Home Waters, pg. 42

George Handley - Environmentalism rehabilitates humanity

Whatever environmentalism seeks to be, it must not denigrate the uniqueness of human experience.  This is because environmental degradation is itself our own suicidal impulse.  And this self-destructiveness is not only an indifference to beauty but an intolerance for the bald fact that we are subject to death and dying.  We need to rehabilitate what it means to be human.  We cannot risk self-hatred.

George B. Handley - Home Waters, pg. xvi

We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering, and in imagining a heaven above, than creating a heaven in our homes and communities.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 111-112

Our vision of others is distorted, because we see them only through the refracted image of ourselves. We play at love, but perform it immaturely, childishly. Paul doesn’t really explain how being able to “know, even as we are known” is related to enduring charity. But in that moment of really seeing Dwayne, I started to understand that once we see each other, we love readily, even inevitably. And real love–Christ’s–comes, undeserved and even unbidden, as a gift of clear sight. Because charity is a gift of God, and not an act of will, it bears all things–even human contradiction; it can come to us even in anger, disgust, or fear, as the infant Christ came to a dark, forgotten corner to dwell among the beasts and his beastly and beloved human kin.

Kristine Haglund, www.bycommonconsent.com, "To See Face to Face"

Our task is to school our appetites, not suppress them, to make them work in concert with a will that disciplines the spirit as much as the flesh.  For desire has both spiritual and bodily expression, and our life is a journey to purify both.  Along the way, we discipline and honor the body, even as we aspire to perfect the soul, finding in the end that the body and spirit, fitly framed together, do indeed provide the deepest joy.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 72

Happiness in marriage fulfils his deepest need, that of belonging to another person, of being needed, wanted, loved, and of loving someone else.  In the company of a friend, man feels free to be himself, knowing that he will be understood and accepted for just what he is. In fact, just to be a man omong men, to share the common lot of all men, can bring deep satisfaction to a human being.

Lowell Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth pg. 97

Three of the pups wandered off immediately as the little dog weaned them, but one, a dis-coordinated male, stayed around and was tolerated by its mother.  Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance...sang at dusk.  The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt.  One evening he got down beside it and  howled.  The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth.  "You're not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do," he told the mongrel.  He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall...Nothing from the pup. But often, threafter, when Grainier heard the wolvesat dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good.

Denis Johnson, Train Dreams, pg. 53

Whatever I am to make of this life, all human beings are in it together.  other persons and toher cultures must be valued by God; surely they matter no less than I.  Yet their beliefs and values in some ways conflict with mine.  I must deal with this.  I have a great bias toward my own local culture, but I become increasingly suspicious of it as I make contact with the wider world.  I grow wary of such terms as "chosen people."  I begin to understand that genuine truth may have many vantages.  My home town is less unique in God's eyes than I had assumed.  I learn and assimilate relativism.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 243) A Thoughtful Faith

There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us."

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 245)

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I'm glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize ther eis nothing more astonishing than a human face...It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But his is the truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 66)

"The reason the stonemason's trade remains esoteric above all others is that the foundation and the hearth are the soul of human society and it is that soul that the false mason threatens."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 66)

"Thinking's rare among all classes. But a laborer who thinks, well, his thought seems more likely to be tempered with humanity. He's more inclined to tolerance. He knows that what is valuable in life is life."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 38)