This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me; Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all bolted against me. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers, weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence worse than Abiram's. Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb, am buried above ground.
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
Civilization | People | Poetry | Story |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
The book of Isaiah both appeals to the theological-ideological assumptions and places them in question because the facts on the ground tell otherwise. Thus the book of Isaiah and the larger Jerusalem tradition expose this difficult interface between theological claim and lived reality, a difficult interface that is front and center in the book of Job, a difficult interface that every pastor must face in the form of the theodicy question.
Courage | Failure | Imagination | Poetry | Spirit | Will | Failure | Old |
The possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda... Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality.
The church in the United States has largely signed on for democratic capitalism, and has watched while capitalism has been transposed into corporate socialism, while the democratic processes have been subordinated to the force of big money. The church has mostly positioned itself so that the promises of the gospel are readily lined out as "the American dream," with endless choices and bottomless entitlements that in turn have required the muscle of the military to sustain.
Poetry |
Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Poetry |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
The aim of a true philosophy must lie, not in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very highest achievement.
Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak four not exempt from pride some future day. Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek, over my open volume you will say, 'this man loved me'—then rise and trip away.
Poetry |
It appears to be among the laws of nature, that the mighty of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the solitary flight of one great bird is followed by the twittering petulance of many smaller.
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed that by what it achieved.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
With a vision, the executive provides the all-important bridge from the present to the future of the organization.
It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet.
Battle | Daughter | Faith | Marriage | Poetry | Prowess | Rites | Satire | Surrender |