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Started reading
March 2, 2018
For the minister is called to recognize the sufferings of his time in his own heart and make that recognition the starting point of his service.
convulsive generation, or speak to a dying man, his service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which he speaks.
understanding of the ways in which the minister can make his own wounds available...
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Nuclear man is a man who has lost naïve faith in the possibilities of technology and is painfully aware that the same powers that enable man to create new life styles carry the potential for self-destruction.
Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction.
Both experiences are valuable and have their good and bad sides, but why should life be lived in just one perspective, under the guidance of just one idea, and within one unchangeable frame of reference?
Tomorrow it might be different again. Who knows? All depends on the people you meet, the experiences you have, and the ideas and desires which make sense to you at the moment.
Nuclear man no longer believes in anything that is always and everywhere true and valid. He lives by the hour and creates his life on the spot.
Therefore he is very tolerant, since he does not regard a man with a different conviction as a threat but rather as an opportunity to discover new ideas and test his own.
When Christianity is reduced to an all-encompassing ideology, nuclear man is all too prone to be skeptical about its relevance to his life experience.
When man is no longer able to look beyond his own death and relate himself to what extends beyond the time and space of his life, he loses his desire to create and the excitement of being human.
man tries to transcend his own worldly environment and move one, two, three or more levels away from the unrealities of his daily existence to a more encompassing view which enables him to experience what is real.
he feels that he belongs to a story of which he
he has a unique place.
to refuse to become the passive victim of his own futurology.
no longer as an isolated individual
prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.
no world or a new world.
wants to pull out the roots of a sick society.
the present-day revolutionary sees the urgent and immediate needs of his suffering fellow man
ruled by love and supported by new ways of interpersonal communication.
the situation is not irreversible and that a total reorientation of mankind is just as possible as is a total self-destruction.
he bases his commitment on the conviction that it is better to give your life than to take it, and that the value of your actions does not depend on their immediate results.
conversion is the individual equivalent of revolution.
personalities might be quite different, but they show the same vision, which leads to a radical self-criticism as well as to a radical activism.
Jesus is the man in whom it has indeed become manifest that revolution and conversion cannot be separated in man’s search for experiential transcendence.
changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.
Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer ...
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He was also a mystic, who did not use his intimate relationship with God to avoid the social evils of his time, but shocked his milieu to the point of being executed as a rebel. In this sense he also rem...
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man Jesus had made it manifest that these two ways do not constitute a contradiction but are in fact two sides of the same mode of experiential transcendence.
No authority, no institution, no outer concrete reality has the power to relieve them of their anxiety and loneliness and make them free.
If turning inward to discover the self is but a step toward becoming a sensitive and honest person, our society’s unfettered faith in youth may turn out to be justified. However, inwardness’ present mood and form seems unbridled by any social norm or tradition and almost void of notions for exercise of responsibility toward others.
inwardness can lead to a form of privatism, which is not only antiauthoritarian and anti-institutional, but is also very self-centered, highly interested in material comfort and the immediate gratification of existing needs and desires.
The inwardness of the coming generation can lead either to a higher level of hypocrisy or to the discovery of the reality of the unseen which can make for a new world. The path it takes will depend to a great extent on the kind of ministry given to this inward generation.
generation in which everyone who claims authority—
is suspect from the very beginning.
But they prefer failure to believing in those who have already failed right before their eyes.
When adult control disappears, the young’s control of each other intensifies.”
Instead of the father, the peer becomes the standard.
Being considered an outcast or a dropout by adults does not worry them. But being excommunicated by the small circle of friends to which they want to belong can be an unbearable experience.
peers. The first means disobedience; the second, nonconformity. The
first creates guilt feelings;
the second, feelings of shame. In this respect there is an obvious shift from a guilt c...
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if youth no longer aspires to become adult and take the place of the fathers, and if the main motivation is conformity to the peer group, we might witness the death of a future-oriented culture or...
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very deep-seated unhappiness with the society in which the young find themselves.
They share a fundamental unhappiness with their world and a strong desire to work for change, but they doubt deeply that they will do better than their parents did, and almost completely lack any kind of vision or perspective.
A man who feels caught like an animal in a trap may be dangerous and destructive, because of his undirected movements caused by his own panic.
rather than offering creative opportunities, they tend to polarize the situation and alienate even more those who are in fact only trying to find out what is worthwhile and what is not.
seeking desperately
for a vision, an ideal to dedicate themselves to—a “faith,” if you want. But their drastic language is often misunderstood