Gleanings from My Readings

"Detecting shades of gray in a world dominated by efforts to cast conflicts and questions in black and white requires both common sense and a willingness to engage reality as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
---Jon Meacham, Newsweek editor

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“We have studied our exegesis as exegesis, our theology as theology, our philosophy as philosophy; we study something about art as art, we study music as music, without understanding that these are things of man, and the things of man are not unrelated parallel lines.”

“I am false or confused if I sing about Christ’s lordship and contrive to retain areas of my own life that are autonomous. This is true if it is my sexual life that is autonomous, but it is at least equally true if it is my intellectual life that is autonomous—or even my intellectual life in a highly selective area.”
---Francis Schaeffer, in Escape from Reason

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“If we want a world alive with art and music and possibility, we have to accept that there will be accidents and tragedies and that innocents will suffer.”
---Philip Martin, columnist

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“When a man can barely earn a subsistence . . . the mind is necessarily imprisoned in its own little tenement; and, fully occupied by keeping it in repair, has not time to rove abroad for improvements. The book of knowledge is closely clasped, against those who must fulfil their daily task of severe manual labour or die; and curiosity, rarely excited by thought or information, seldom moves on the stagnate lake of ignorance.”
---Mary Walstonecraft, in Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman

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From David Shumate’s poem “High Water Mark”:

“I know it’s not the kind of thing you ought to say . . .
But I wouldn’t mind seeing another good flood before I die.
It’s been dry for decades. Next time I think I’ll just let go and
drift downstream and see where I end up.” (10-13)

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From Bill Holm’s poem “Wedding Poem For Schele and Phil”:

“History and experience both make clear
That men and women do not hear
The music of the world in the same key,
. . .
But the dark secret of the ones long married,
A pleasure never mentioned to the young . . .” (8-10, 22-23)

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Happy Reading!