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21 " Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world. "
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Ethics (Works, # 6)
22 " Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors. "
― George Lakoff , Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
23 " Our political discourse has degenerated into anxieties about whether giving benefits to those people over there will take money out of the pockets of my kind of people over here, even when the changes are those from which we would all benefit." " The church is one of the few remaining institutions in the American scene that normalizes the effects of slavery, with most Christians preserving these segregated spaces in the interests of cultural comfort. Racially separate churches violate the interdependence that should characterize authentic Christian communities. Further, this individualism blocks churches from the blessings of gifts preserved in separate traditions. For example, segregated white churches celebrate the confessions and the rich legacies of the intellectual giants of the faith, but too often preach a weak and disembodied gospel that reduces spirituality to symbolism, and that separates material concerns from moral choices and the pursuit of righteousness." " Indeed, we have reached a sad state of affairs when we are all unwilling to be challenged when we go to church." " We should not move too quickly to a cheap reconciliation that forgets the past rather than honoring it as a clay vessel that contains a refined treasure bearing witness to the presence of Jesus at the margins. We need to make space for the histories of ethnic pain to be shared and revered among whites and all peoples of color, and to be instructed by them. That is, we need to understand how our past impinges on the present before we can move forward together toward our future. We cannot be who we are called to be unless we can gain access to the treasures of the gospel that have been preserved in the separate traditions of now segregated ethnic churches. We will not testify to the glory of God and the manifold riches of his mercy to the nations until we do. "
24 " MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior. "
― Carl Sagan , Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
25 " One may characterize physics as the doctrine of the repeatable, be it a succession in time or the co-existence in space. The validity of physical theorems is founded on this repeatability. "
― Friedrich Hund
26 " When I tell other Christians of my time with the goddess, I think they expect me to characterize it as a period in my life when I was misguided, and that I have now thankfully come back to both Jesus and my senses. But it's not like that. I can't imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can't imagine that God doesn't reveal God’s self in countless ways outside of the symbol system of Christianity. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine. "
― Nadia Bolz-Weber , Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner Saint
27 " Noble blood is an accident of fortune noble actions characterize the great. "
28 " Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age. "
29 " Political folk talk a lot these days about 'messaging' - a neologism designed to describe the way in which parties and politicians consciously characterize their efforts. It is only intended to be positive - i.e., 'Our messaging is designed to show we care.' "
30 " I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations. "