From Nature to Creation Quotes

“Idols evoke worship in us because we think they can save us from life’s contingencies, mysteries, and finitude. Put another way, we make idols of all sorts of things—the stock market, a job, superstar athletes and performers, our families—because we think that by giving our allegiance to them we will make our lives secure and complete.”
― Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation (The Church and Postmodern Culture): A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World

“Whenever we make an idol of anything, we presuppose that it has the power to give life. We confuse something given by God as a means of life with its being the source and fulfillment of life. False worship is so dangerous because it witnesses to human attention and energy being directed in ways that are bound to lead to mutual harm.”
― Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation (The Church and Postmodern Culture): A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World

“Media platforms and technological devices are not simply neutral tools that we use to move through life. Their power is much more extensive, because they shape and frame what we perceive and understand the world to be. When people spend enough time in front of screens, it becomes all but inevitable that the whole world takes on the character of something to be watched. Given the technologies we now have for manipulating screens in whatever fashion we like to suit our own particular tastes, if we find the Mona Lisa boring, no problem. We can run the image through the Fatify app or add the graphics and colors we like to make it amusing or better than the original! Should we be surprised that people often find the world uninteresting and dull?”
― Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation (The Church and Postmodern Culture): A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World

“According to Scripture, the world we live in is God’s creation. It is the visual, fragrant, audible, touchable, and tastable manifestation of God’s love, the place where God’s desire that others be and be well finds earthly expression.”
― Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation (The Church and Postmodern Culture): A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World

“God’s shabbat has nothing to do with God being tired or worn out from the labor of creating. Instead it points to the delight God finds in beholding the world, and the delight God expresses in loving the world into being. God’s rest, quite unlike our own, is not a means of escape from the pressures and strains of the world. It couldn’t be, because God’s world is saturated and sustained by love, and love results in relationship rather than alienation, hospitality rather than separation. God’s rest is a perfect, affirming presence to the world, a presence in which others are fully acknowledged and embraced as good and beautiful. In genuine shabbat there is no restlessness at all because there is no other place one could possibly want to be, no other thing one could possibly want to have (restlessness can here be defined as the inability or refusal to love and be grateful for where and who one is and whom one is with).26 To be in a Sabbath frame of heart is to be able to find a riverbank worthy of a lifetime’s attention and care because one now sees in it the love of God at work. Is it possible to be tired or bored with God’s love?”
― Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation (The Church and Postmodern Culture): A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World

“To appreciate that objectivity is a highly contested phenomenon does not mean that reality is nothing more than a social construction, a fleeting figment of our imaginations. What needs challenging is the idea that there is some underlying, inviolable reality called nature that does not change (the natural sciences are claimed to study this), while our awareness and cultural sensibilities do (the social sciences and humanities are claimed to study this). There is no “raw” access to the world, because the moment we try to enter the “objective world,” we find ourselves already there. What we face is always a joint history of the human sciences and the physical world together. Bruno Latour wisely suggests that when we abandon the notion of a stable, unchanging nature, “we are leaving intact the two elements that matter the most to us: the multiplicity of non-humans and the enigma of their interaction [with us].”29 We open a space in which genuine interaction and reciprocal learning between creatures can occur. We look for opportunities in which the reality of life together can inspire, correct, and inform our understanding.”
― Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation (The Church and Postmodern Culture): A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World

“As Athanasius understands it, there is foolishness in the idolatrous gesture because it takes but a moment’s reflection to see that one must be claiming to be a god in order to make a god, because the maker is always better than what he or she makes. That such god-makers die is proof enough that they are not gods. It would be more honest, though of course still silly, for the people who worship such idols to fix their gaze on the (mortal, fallible) idol maker.”
― Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation (The Church and Postmodern Culture): A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World