Evan

“Although the charismatic movement that influenced Protestant churches in the 1970s is often seen as a conservative reaction to liberalizing trends, the reality is rather different. Although the new emphasis in charismatic fellowships on 'gifts of the Holy Spirit' as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophesying might seem like a significant injection of supernaturalism, it eroded the doctrinal orthodoxy of conservative Protestant sects and weakened the behavioral codes that had served to distinguish conservative Protestants from the wider population. The new churches recruited primarily from older denominations and sects rather from the unchurched, and much of their appeal lay in the way they disguised the extent of change with some old language. Far from being a cure for the liberalization of the faith, they made the change easier by providing easy steps away from the old orthodoxies.”
― Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory

“Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy's shore.

Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator;
he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys
in every odyssey, one on worried water,

the other crouched and motionless, without noise.
For both, the 'I' is a mast; a desk is a raft
for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak

of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft
carries the other to cities where people speak
a different language, or look at him differently,

while the sun rises from the other direction
with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey
is motionless; as the sea moves round an island

that appears to be moving, Jove moves round the heart
with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand
knows it returns to the port from which it must start.

Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you,
why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you:
to circle yourself and your island with this art.”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“Through the entertainment of the ears, a weaker mind can rise up to devotional feeling. Yet when in my own case it happens that the song moves me more than the subject, I confess I've committed a punishable sin, and then I'd rather not hear someone singing.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov