Wayne Larson > Wayne's Quotes

“One of these days I'm going to leave Nebraska, cut all those strings and ties and travel to the other prairies of this earth. I must know if the people who live on those other prairies feel the same way about their horizons as we do about ours.”
― John Janovy Jr., Yellowlegs

“We often talk about being “born again” as if we’ve left our past behind. But our past comes with us, often haunting us. Freedom’s trials can shatter our optimism, making us want to turn back to what was secure and familiar.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places

“God gave Israel a law that would govern just relations between people (Exodus 20); preserve rights for women, slaves, and strangers (Exodus 21); envision right social relations (Exodus 22); invite respect for aliens and strangers (Exodus 23:9); and engender respect and stewardship over the land (Exodus 23:10-13). Far from limiting freedom, it aimed to set God’s newly liberated people free to flourish.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places

“Job needed friends to engage the pain, not interpret the pain. He needed friends who would join the chorus of lament, not offer a recipe for a more faithful life. In the end, Job is commended for his honesty while his theologically correct buddies are scolded for their insensitivity. God does not want us to disguise ourselves, hiding the pain we feel so deeply.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places

“Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

“You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Early in his majestic Church Dogmatics, Barth experimented with a doctrine of inspiration that allowed for a strong affirmation of scriptural fallibilism with a high doctrine of scriptural authority. The Bible, he said there, (CD I.2, section 19) was not directly identical to the Word of God, but could become it in a secondary fashion, by the agency, act, and presence of the Holy Spirit. Barth’s Christocentrism there took on a Christomorphic tone, so that Holy Scripture consisted in an altogether human text and authorship, joined to an altogether Divine Reality and Spirit. Such indirect identity gave Barth’s early doctrine of Scripture remarkable dynamism and exegetical freedom. But in practice, Barth did not distinguish so sharply and confidently between the inspired Word and the biblical letter. His fine print excurses showed a reliance upon the biblical text as both authoritative and self-authenticating, a living witness to Almighty God.”
― Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: The Doctrine of God

“How much of our energy goes into defining ourselves by deciding “I am what I do,” “I am what others say about me,” or “I am what I have”? When that’s the case, life often follows a repetitive up-and-down motion.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith

“Our faith in merit is spiritually and morally harmful for parents and children, teachers and students, winners and losers, individuals and communities. And it is based on the belief that we are our own.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

“You know, Origen, one of the greatest doctors of your Church, was one of us. He believed in reincarnation, you know.” “As I recall, we kicked his ass out.”
― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

“The students are fighting the National Guard, the Lefts are fighting the Knotheads, the blacks are fighting the whites. The Jews are being persecuted.” “What are the Christians doing?” “Nothing.”
― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

“The postwar power of “the media” to determine what shall be embraced as reality is in large part due to the success of the morale culture in wartime. It represents, indeed, its continuation. Today, nothing—neither church, university, library, gallery, philanthropy, foundation, or corporation—no matter how actually worthy and blameless, can thrive unless bolstered by a persuasive professional public-relations operation, supervised by the later avatars of the PR colonels and captains so indispensable to the maintenance of high morale and thus to the conduct of the Second World War.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“The same tricks of publicity and advertising might have succeeded in sweetening the actualities of Vietnam if television and a vigorous uncensored moral journalism hadn’t been brought to bear. America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“What annoyed the troops and augmented their sardonic, contemptuous attitude toward those who viewed them from afar was in large part this public innocence about the bizarre damage suffered by the human body in modern war.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“the saddest thing in the world isn’t to have bad thoughts or feelings. The saddest thing in the world is to believe things that are not true.”
― John Andrew Bryant, A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ

“What could be worse than not being at home in our own house? What hope do we have of finding rest outside of ourselves if we cannot be at ease within? Whether or not we appreciate them, we must always live in close proximity to our faculties: they are our greatest relatives and most faithful friends. And yet, as if they were resentful of the damage our imperfections have done to them, our faculties seem to be waging war upon us. Peace, peace, Christ says, my friends.”
― Teresa de Ávila, The Interior Castle

“Be assured that the more progress you make in loving your neighbor, the greater will be your love for God.”
― Teresa de Ávila, The Interior Castle

“It was decades later that Rubel confessed that this U.S. plan for nuclear war he participated in reminded him of the Nazis’ plans for genocide. In his memoir, he referred to a time in an earlier world war when a group of Third Reich officials met at a lakeside villa in a German town called Wannsee. It was there, over the course of a ninety-minute meeting, that this group of allegedly rational men decided among themselves how to move forward with the genocide in a war they were presently winning—World War II—so as to ensure total victory for themselves. Millions of people needed to die, these Reich officials agreed.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“There is a myth among Americans that the U.S. can easily shoot down an incoming, attacking ICBM. Presidents, congresspeople, defense officials, and countless others in the military-industrial complex have all said as much. This is simply not true.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer.”
― Aeschylus

“Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant” as a kind of quiet, unintelligible blessing: Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”
― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning