Now I want to be clear that I believe God can and does speak. If I could summarize the thesis of my book in the size of a tweet, it would be, “God always speaks; we rarely listen.”

Henry Neufeld about his book When People Speak for God

Could the Garden of Eden have lasted very long without predators? Interesting article about death before the fall.

But there was never a dull torment,
and it was grace to live
among the fruits of summer, to love by design,
and walk the startling Earth
for what seemed
an endless resurrection of days.

Diane Ackerman

God is not the patch of meaning on the wound…God is the wound we put our patch of meaning upon.

Peter Rollins

Okay, after the fact I realize that this quote invites misinterpretation. Let me explain.

What’s the wound? Our disillusionment with the world, its suffering, and our place in it.

And then what is God? Is He a band-aid we invent to make our boo-boo feel better? Is He some patch we apply to keep our disillusionment and discontent from getting worse?

No! God is the ultimate reality, and whatever problems we have with the world we also have with Him. Whatever our understanding of God and the world, it had better be able to explain why we ended up wounded, and be more than just a covering to disguise that something’s gone wrong.

Theology is the discipline of faith seeking understanding.

Comment by Drew left on an article at the blog Exploring our Matrix

We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
— Francois de la Rouchefoucauld

From a comment to a blog post at Evangelical Dialog following an article about evangelical theology and evolutionary science.

Theology and science are like ice dance partners. Both interpret the same music (ie the truth). Much of the time, they dance together in complete harmony holding hands and following the same path on the ice. Sometimes they dance alone, each doing their own thing, competing for our attention. They are both dancing to the same music, both are in harmony with the music, yet their dance is different. As the audience, we aren’t sure who to watch, which one is right, and wonder why their dance is different. Sometimes, they help each other dance. One may be stronger at times and lift the other, or spin them in a new direction, or help them up when they fall down. Yes, both dancers are imperfect and they will fall down or get out of synch with the music. Their partner is there to help them get back on track. When it comes time to judge the dance, we all give different ratings. We favour one over the other. We may gloss over some imperfections and become irritated at others. We may even wish there was only one dancer. Yet, the dance is made for a couple. We need to watch both partners. We need to accept that each partner is interpreting the music in a way that is true to their nature. We need to rejoice that there are two partners, providing us with two perspectives on the same music. And while our attention is often on the dancers themselves, we need to remind ourselves that it is the music that is important. The dance partners are there to help us understand and appreciate the music. The dance partners are not the music.

Stupid is as stupid does and boy are you a busy little thing.

Seen as a tweet on twitter.com.

Parts for basses have included notes as low as the B-flat two octaves and a tone below middle C…

Wow. Two octaves and a tone. That is to singing what “four score and seven years” is to mathematics. Damn you, wikipedia

God, of course, is not injured or insulted or threatened by our sin. … All the insult and injury we do in sinning is to ourselves alone, not to God. … God’s forgiveness does not mean any change whatever in God. It just means the change in the sinner that God’s unwavering and eternal love brings about. … It would make no sense to speak of God as refusing to accept our repentence. Our repentence is God’s forgiveness of us. … We do not express our contrition in order to persuade God to grant us his forgiveness. Our contrition is God granting us forgiveness.

All that God asks of us is that we put aside the barriers, the illusions and the timidity that stand in the way of accepting his love. All that he asks is that we relax and let ourselves be filled with his love, which eliminates our sins and makes us channels and bearers of his love and forgiveness to everyone.

Herbert McCabe