World Without End Quotes

“But the apocalyptic visions heralded by climate change are decidedly not futuristic. Another world is coming, one unlike anything we've ever seen, arriving every moment. It's not on some other planet, or in some other time. It's unfolding here, right now. Whenever a patch of Siberian tundra burns, or rain falls on a Greenland icecap, or a coastal marsh is inundated with saltwater and releases more carbon into the atmosphere, the world we've known slips further from view,”
― Martha Park, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After

“I had never consciously thought of scriptural interpretation as a decision made within the context of community, as a prism through which we could discern a community's choices about what- or who-was important to them. No matter whether you believe the Bible is the literal word of God, handed down from on high, or a collection of texts formed and revised over centuries, the Bible doesn't tell you how to read it or what meaning to take from it. It is too contradictory, too fickle, too strange to pretend otherwise. Any interpretation is a choice that says far more about the person or community doing the interpreting than it does about the text itself”
― Martha Park, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After

“The stories my father told- - whether from his personal life or from scripture, were slippery, changing shape depending on the form or the audience or the passage of time. They allowed me to glimpse different versions of my father and his faith as it changed, too, over the course of his life. These stories seemed to say that stories them- selves have no fixed meaning. Instead they are deep wells, infinitel plumbable, that we can return to endlessly to find that somehow they-or we-have changed.”
― Martha Park, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After