“A TRUE ATHEIST is one who is willing to face the full consequences of what it means to say there is no God.  To say there is no God means among other things that there are no absolute standards. For instance, if you are an atheist who believes with all your heart that murder is wrong and you run into somebody else who believes with all her heart that murder isn’t wrong as long as she can get away with it, there is no absolute standard by which it can be shown that one view is better than the other, just as there is no absolute standard by which it can be shown that vanilla is better than chocolate” (Richard Roher).

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“Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize” (Elizabeth Harrison).

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“Eternity is not endless time or the opposite of time.  It is the essence of time.  If you spin a pinwheel fast enough, all its colors blend into a single color – white – which is the essence of all of the colors of the spectrum combined.  If you spin time fast enough, time-past, time-present, and time-to- come all blend into a single timelessness or eternity, which is the essence of all times combined” (Frederick Buechner).

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“It’s in that convergence of spiritual people becoming active and active people becoming spiritual that the hope of humanity now rests” (Van Jones).

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“We are each a God-carrier, a tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, indwelt by God the holy and most blessed Trinity.  To treat one such as less than this is not just wrong. . . . It is veritably blasphemous and sacrilegious. It is as if we were to spit in the face of God. Consequently injustice, racism, exploitation, oppression are to be opposed not as a political task but as a response to a religious, a spiritual imperative. Not to oppose these manifestations of evil would be tantamount to disobeying God” (Bishop Desmond Tutu).

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“Almost always when we talk about prayer we are thinking of something we do and, from that standpoint, questions, problems, confusion, discouragement, illusions multiply. For me, it is of fundamental importance to correct this view. Our Christian knowledge assures us that prayer is essentially what God does, how God addresses us, looks at us. It is not primarily something we are doing to God, something we are giving to God but what God is doing for us. And what God is doing for us is giving the divine Self in love” (Ruth Burrows).

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“There are just some kind of men who — who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results” (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird ).