There are, of course, some people I would have loved to have known as mentors....such as Augustine of Hippo, Athanasius of Alexandria, or Martin Luther...or to journey alongside them in person and talk to them.... Yet I can read their books. While this is no substitute for the living presence of a mentor, it allows me to absorb their ideas and work out how I might benefit from their wisdom.
Picking up two of my favorite books...as ironic as that may be for Bradbury's book :)
“Steven, you keep talking about being a failure, but do you realize you can‘t fail? ...Well, let us remind you of...that because of the grace of God and the fact that Jesus has already taken all the failure on Himself, it‘s actually impossible for you to be a failure in His eyes. That‘s what‘s so amazing about the grace of God....You can‘t mess it up!”
In a 1997 commencement address to a small college in Florida, the nearly octogenarian Graham had sage and gentle words for the young people just starting their careers: “I urge of you to invest your lives, not just spend them. Each of us is given the exact same amount of seconds, minutes, and hours per day as anyone else. The difference is how we redeem our allotted time…. You cannot count your days, but you can make your days count.”
Perhaps the real truth is that he remained "loyal to traditional formulations," as William Martin put it, but he also possessed the heart of a pastor. His...training told him one thing but his encounters with real problems of real people...pulled him in another.... We might call it "emotional intelligence": the posture of a man who had talked to too many people of different life experiences to be willing to to judge them. Only God could to that.
so-soMark talks of his if childhood and the things he faced growing up and how it impacted him well into adulthood. The memoir finishes with a wonderful account of Mark and his father reconciling and Mark expressing his forgiveness towards his father.
I almost stopped reading this book a few chapters in.. I'm glad I didn't.
"We have only to say that the Darwinian system, as we understand it, coincides well with the theistic view of Nature. It not only acknowledges purpose (in the Contemporary Reviewer's sense), but builds upon it; and if purpose in this sense does not of itself imply design, it is certainly compatible with it, and suggestive of it."
"Darwinian evolution (whatever may be said of other kinds) is neither theistical nor nontheistical. Its relations to the question of design belong to the natural theologian, or, in the larger sense, to the philosopher."
"Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an' then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home--" Jean Louise is a smart kid. I love this line... Oughta make you think about how you treat people.
"Two lines of text representing hundreds of work hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars in parts. It also represented the aftermath of coming within a hand's breadth of fiery annihilation for the ship and crew. Describing it in two quick sentences felt almost sacrilegious."
"The aliens that sent the protomolecule hadn't needed to destroy humanity. They'd given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they'd leaped on it."
"Someone just broke pretty much all of human civilization overnight."
This just got real interesting...as if it wasn't already.
"Space...Is too damn big." One of the reasons I enjoy reading SciFi books. Space is big and we'll never really get to explore it at any great length, so reading about different worlds that people come up with is fun. It's hard to imagine what it would be like traveling through space, where it can sometimes take months before reaching another colony or trying to communicate with someone when there's a time delay because "space is too damn big."
Excited to return to this series again. I read the first book a while ago, but had a few other books on my list I wanted to complete first before tackling this series. Kids are in bed, just a little reading and bourbon to end the day. #bourbon #TheExpanse
pickNot his best writing, I really enjoyed WOOL though, and but the best book I've read, but there are some great quotes in this book. In the end, a decent read that made me laugh a few times. On the hand, PTSD and dementia are serious, this book gives a little light into what that might look like for someone.
There has been a great deal of debate about the extent to which the founding fathers were Christian in any historic orthodox sense of the term. My own research inclines me to conclude that most were more deistic than Christian, and that they collectively had no intention of founding an explicitly Christian nation.
Among other things, when we associate Jesus with America, even in the most remote ways, we legitimize the widespread global perception that the Christian faith can be judged on the basis of what America has done in the past or continues to do in the present.
Instead of living out the radically countercultural mandate of the kingdom of God, this myth has inclined us to Christianize many pagan aspects of our culture. Instead of providing the culture with a radically alternative way of life, we largely present it with a religious version of what it already is. The myth clouds our vision of God‘s distinctly beautiful kingdom and thereby undermines our motivation to live as set-apart (holy)....
"Big Bang was not a chaotic, disorderly event. Instead, it appears to have been fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a complexity and precision that literally defies human comprehension. In other words, the universe we see today—and our very existence—depends upon a set of highly special initial conditions. This phenomenon is strong evidence that the Big Bang was not an accident, but that it was designed."
"Science and religion . . . are friends, not foes, in the common quest for knowledge. Some people may find this surprising, for there‘s a feeling throughout our society that religious belief is outmoded, or downright impossible, in a scientific age. I don‘t agree."
...I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there's no other way to play it.
I came to a realization about this very early in my life. As I see it, there's a decision we all have to make, and it seems perfectly captured in the Winnie-the-Pooh characters created by A. A. Miller. Each of us must decide: Am I a fun-loving Tigger or am I a sad-sack Eeyore? Pick a camp. (pg 179)
