“When I go no further in my consideration of my fellow human, I betray my preference for caricature over perception, a shrug as opposed to a vision of the lived fact of somebody in a body.”
“Religion is a controlling story. … Stories change but the fact of story doesn’t.”
“It is certainly often an opiate for the masses, but it can also function as the poetry of the people.”
“When we take it on as a sacred obligation, nuance also delivers us out of the deadly habit of cutting people out of our own imaginations.”
“Witness is simply the evidence of my output. My witness is the sum of everything I do and leave undone.”
“It’s exceedingly difficult to discuss religion with people who are absolutely certain only other people have one.”
“Broad is the path of dismembering, and narrow is the gate of righteous remembering. … True religion, remembering well amid the haste, hurry and distraction of the average day, requires a conscious effort. Being an ecstatic affirmer, a noticer supreme, is a full-time job.”
“The act of self-expression, putting our stories, our jams, our beloved enthusiasms on the table, isn’t just an essential practice of self-preservation, it also creates the possibility of neighborliness, a meaning-making exercise in the work of being a human being among human beings.”
“People come to consciousness in relationship. This is the phenomenon—oh, how it enlivens a heart!—of shared meaning.”
“Like brainwash, ideology isn’t something anyone is likely to knowingly avow any more than we would think it kind to congratulate people for how thoroughly conformist they are.”
“The delight of…anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable jot is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.”
“Poetry happens when I’m made to really see something I’ve overlooked, something needful, something that might bring me back to myself.”
“The old way can begin to feel like the only way cultural treasures might go on being treasured by someone somewhere somehow whether it’s reading a book all the way through or placing a needle on vinyl. The slow labor of discovery and the patience real amazement require is otherwise in danger of being lost.”
“We love our labels as ourselves even as they don’t—and can’t—do justice to the complexity of our own lived lives or anyone else’s. It’s as if we’ll do anything to avoid the burden of having to think twice.”
“We begin to take up the task of empathy when we’re susceptible to the sense that the inner lives of others might be as real and as realistic as our own.”
Geoffrey Hill: “Tyranny requires simplification.”
“Good religion cherishes bodies, and it is evident in any practice that restores, reinforces, reconsiders and redeems the human form, locating it, in Thoreau’s phrase, as “a part and parcel of nature.””
“To be whole is to be part. None of us gets to have our meaning alone.”
“Your religion is the story you tell yourself about yourself to others. As it happens, it doesn’t always coincide with what we think—or say—we believe.”
“According to the prevailing delusions, to see all human activity as religious is to see the world illegally.”