This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A sense of hurry in pastoral work disqualifies one for the work of conversation and prayer that develops relationships that meet personal needs. There are heavy demands put upon pastoral work, true; there is difficult work to be engaged in, yes. But the pastor must not be ‘busy.’… there must be a wide margin of leisure.
Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?
Spirit |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.
Henry James said there isn't any difference between the English novel and the American novel since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Will |
If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like spiritual direction? Why not just friend?
We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God sticks with us.
Birth | Death | Understanding | Will |
I have my doubts (that the schools will open on time). We have a law case out of Sojourner-Douglass, and at Chesapeake we have all kinds of issues.
Expectation | God | Illusion | Imagination | Meaning | Means | Will | Work | God | Expectation |
I haven't made that decision. But I would certainly welcome the superintendent of schools, instead of pointing the finger at everybody and everything, taking some accountability of what is happening on his watch.
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness.
Age | Experience | Future | God | Old age | People | Soul | Spirit | Study | Theology | God | Old |
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
In 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like all other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. The Illinois Central Railroad Company selected the site upon which the city is built and this consisted of a vast miasmatic swamp far better suited to mosquito culture than for human beings. From the day the site was chosen by (and of course in the interest of all) said railway company, everything that entered into the building of the town and the development of the city was determined purely from profit considerations and without the remotest concern for the health and comfort of the human beings who were to live there, especially those who had to do all the labor and produce all the wealth.
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
The very moment a workingman begins to do his own thinking he understands the paramount issue, parts company with the capitalist politician and falls in line with his own class on the political battlefield.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
Death | Equanimity | Eternal | Evil | Fear | Grace | Life | Life | Men | Reward | Will |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
WeÂ’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. EverybodyÂ’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.