Every once in a while someone talks to me about my blog. They read it! Someone stopped me at church to say so and I want to thank him and you. This is unimaginably rewarding. I know that people are reading, because WordPress gives me stats that show how many view my blog each day. But when a real live person takes the time to tell me that what I write means something to them — well, that is priceless to me. Thank you Eric! What flows from my heart is what I write here and it is a part of me. It is my discoveries, my pain, my growth and better understanding of the world. Thank you for reading.
I love new discoveries. So, you may think I am stuck under an intellectual rock but I just discovered Miroslav Volf tonight and I’m loving his brain. I spent about a 1/2 hour watching him on YouTube. I’m hooked.
“The proper distance from a culture does not take Christians out of that culture. Christians are not the insiders who have taken flight to a new “Christian culture” and become outsiders to their own culture; rather when they have responded to the call of the Gospel they have stepped, as it were, with …one foot outside their own culture while the other remaining firmly planted in it. They are distant, and yet they belong . . . distance born out of allegiance to God and God’s future. . . . Both distance and belonging are essential. Belonging without distance destroys . . . but distance without belonging isolates.”
— Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace
And then there is this. I have no idea who John Stuart Mill is (again the uneducated rock) but this quote knocked me off my seat.
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. . . . Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art of pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.
— John Stuart Mill
On the topic of women and equality this is the quote that stuck out to me in my reading this week.
“Life will not be less than, when women are truly equal with men. Life will be richer, and greater, and men will be more than they are now, when women are no longer considered less than they really are.” — discombobula
And I’ll leave you with a quote from the author of one of my favorite books, The Secret Life of Bees.
In that curious and exotic way that an “unteacher” appears only when the student is ready, the Magritte painting appeared and opened several revelations to me. First, our lives as women are not always as self-created as we might assume. And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father – the man holding the brush – and live up to his image of what a woman should be and do. We’re rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don’t.
— Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter
Miroslav Volf (born 1956) is an influential Christian theologian and currently the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale University Divinity School and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, which focuses in part on Workplace spirituality . He has been a member in both the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Evangelical Church in Croatia. He is widely known for his works on systematic theology, ethics, conflict resolution, and peace-making. Recently he contributed the essay, “Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Justice” to a new text on the atonement, Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ.
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control.[2] He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham’s. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method.[3] Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
Discombobula. notes from a contemplative sort of a tree hugger, who blogs.
Logic & Imagination 
One thought on “Quote Unquote”