Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The House passed this proposed Fourteenth Amendment on May 10, 1866, by an overwhelming majority, sparking applause on the floor and cheers from the public galleries.”

“He agreed to this less-than-ideal "short step" toward black suffrage because he had no way of achieving a superior measure. But he made clear to everyone both his views as well as the limitations of the compromise he felt compelled to accept. By refusing to pretend that the amendment was better than it was, he prepared allies and supporters to renew the fight when conditions allowed.”

“As these words demonstrate, Stevens did not—contrary to his reputation in some quarters—reject compromise in general. He offered a textbook lesson in how to accept a necessary compromise without abandoning or concealing one's own political position and preferences and so without disorienting one's allies and supporters.”

“So what does all this mean practically? It means that congregations must be conscious of the persistent and ineradicable loneliness that makes a person seek communion, with other people and with God, in the first place. It means that conservative churches that are infused with the bouncy brand of American optimism one finds in sales pitches are selling shit.”

“It goes both ways, though: mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable, pontificating, and anti-intellectual services so common in mainstream American churches.”

“sometimes meaning inheres in unmeaning. I don’t mean "what seems like unmeaning"; this is hedging one’s bets... It is the absoluteness of meaninglessness that Christianity, as I understand it, inhabits and inflects, the shock and stark violence of the cross that discloses the living Christ. Revelation, like creation, arises not merely out of nothingness but by means of it.”

“If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning. When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.”

“To think of actions shaping feelings is one way we rid ourselves of conventionally accepted assumptions such as that parents love their children, or that one simply "falls" in love without exercising will or choice, that there are such things as "crimes of passion," i.e., he killed her because he loved her so much.”

“To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our "feelings." Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences.”

“Usually, it requires some therapeutic intervention, whether through literature that teaches and enlightens us or therapy, before many of us can even begin to critically examine childhood experiences and acknowledge the ways in which they have had an impact on our adult behavior.”

“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care. Often we hear of a man who beats his children and wife and then goes to the corner bar and passionately proclaims how much he loves them.”

“For ultimately, in a civilization which is constructed on the principle of achievement and enjoyment, and therefore makes pain and death a private matter, excluded from its public life … there is nothing so unpopular as for the crucified God to be made a present reality through faith. It alienates alienated men, who have come to terms with alienation.” —Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God

“More radical Christian faith can only mean committing oneself without reserve to the "crucified God." This is dangerous. It does not promise the confirmation of one’s own conceptions, hopes and good intentions. It promises first of all the pain of repentance and fundamental change. It offers no recipe for success. But it brings a confrontation with the truth.”

“How to speak of these things? Language, even as it reaches for a life beyond this one, must bear the mark of being lost. Not having been lost. Being lost. Because however intently one believes in the resurrection, it remains a matter of belief. That absolute destitution and longing that caused Christ to call out on the cross, though, that terror and emptiness in the presence of death and grief”

“I don’t know what it means to say that Christ “died for my sins” (who wants that? who invented that perverse calculus?), but I do understand—or intuit, rather—the notion of God not above or beyond or immune to human suffering, but in the very midst of it, intimately with us in our sorrow, our sense of abandonment, our hellish astonishment at finding ourselves utterly alone, utterly helpless.”

“Explaining further, he continues: "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love." Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.”

“I spent years searching for a meaningful definition of the word "love," and was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled, first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."”

“Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition. The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”

“"It is possible to speak with our heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. In modern life we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have lost this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart." -JACK KORNFIELD”

“How does theology exist after—how does it speak to—such suffering? For Moltmann the answer lay in that moment on the cross when Christ agonizes My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?, and he argued in The Crucified God that all modern theology had to be developed "in earshot of the dying Christ."”

“Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine. (H. J. IWAND)”

“Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists!”

“God was gone, and not simply in an intellectual sense either, not in the God-is-dead style of coffee-shop existentialists, but really gone, ripped from humanity’s very viscera, a howling silence at the center of some of the worst suffering men and women have known.”

“Every man has a man within him who must die.”

“art is so often better at theology than theology is”

“"Believing, then, that this is the best proposition that can be made effectual," Stevens explained, "I accept it." To allow it instead to die would have "postponed the protection of the colored race perhaps for ages." He would not "throw away a great good because it is not perfect. I will take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times."”

“Unfortunately, he had been compelled to recognize, the halfway measure being considered was "all that can be obtained in the present state of public opinion" because "the public mind has been educated in error for a century" and was therefore unreceptive to guaranteeing fully equal rights to all men.”

“Stevens acknowledged the shortcomings of the proposed amendment... It was "not all that the committee desired, it falls far short of my wishes." He had long believed that the founding fathers "had been compelled to postpone the principles of their great Declaration [of Independence], and wait for their full establishment till a more propitious time." That time, Stevens thought, should by now have arrived.”

“the Joint Committee subsequently reported out a weaker version of the amendment providing that a state's House delegation be reduced only in proportion to the number of adult male citizens specifically barred from the polls. Stevens acknowledged the shortcomings of the proposed amendment on May 8, 1866. It was "not all that the committee desired," he said, and it "falls far short of my wishes." ”

“Unless something were done about it, a southern state would now benefit from the full number of its black residents even though blacks could not vote in that state. Ironically, thus, the extinction of the three-fifths clause would strengthen the political hand of freed-people's former masters. Congress could have solved this problem by placing enfranchisement of southern black men in the proposed... amendment”