Anita Yoder > Anita's Quotes

“Without a connectedness to Christian tradition, to the Church through time, we too easily dilute is strangeness, succumbing to the tyranny of the present. We make Christianity comfortable, palatable, adorn it in the fashions of our day. While the Church must always work to make her truth alive and heard in the present age--which is difficult, if the Church is not a coherent entity--she must also preserve it from being harnessed by the zeitgeist and made to serve its ends. When this happens, Christianity loses its countercultural witness, its prophetic voice, which will always, in one way or another, be at odds with the surrounding society.”
― Abigail Favale

“There is a givenness to our bodies that makes present the realities of God, and the intricate nexus of these images, that sacred web, has become far more precious to me, far more beautiful than a flattened, bland gesture toward earthly equality. Sacrificing the embodiment of these metaphors to satisfy some modern egalitarian sensibility would be, to me, a tragic desecration, a calamitous loss.”
― Abigail Favale

“If we think marriage is easy and self-satisfying and the celibate life is difficult and self-denying, we've understood neither, at least not in the Christian sense. The cross is not imposed on gay and celibate people but offered to all as a means to holiness. We are all asked to curb our sexual desires out of deference for human life and its genesis in human sexuality.”
― Abigail Favale

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“The curious seeks knowledge out of anxiety and fear; the studious seeks knowledge from a place of love.”
― Alex Sosler, Learning to Love: Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage

“To prefer to be the servant rather than the lord of the household is the path of downward mobility in an upwardly mobile culture. To taunt the idols of prestige, honor, and recognition, to refuse to take oneself seriously or to take seriously others who take themselves seriously, and to freely embrace the servant lifestyle—these are the attitudes that bear the stamp of authentic discipleship.”
― Brennan Manning, Reflections for Ragamuffins: Daily Devotions from the Writings of Brennan Manning

“Unless a theologian has the inner fortitude of a desert saint, he has only one effective remedy against the threat of cognitive collapse in the face of these pressures: he must huddle together with like-minded fellow deviants⁠—and huddle very closely indeed. Only in a countercommunity of considerable strength does cognitive deviance have a chance to maintain itself. The countercommunity provides continuing therapy against the creeping doubt as to whether, after all, one may not be wrong and the majority right. To fulfill its functions of providing social support for the deviant body of "knowledge," the countercommunity must provide a strong sense of solidarity among its members (a "fellowship of the saints" in a world rampant with devils) and it must be quite closed vis-à-vis the outside ("Be not yoked together with unbelievers"); in sum, it must be a kind of ghetto.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural