Let us consider for a moment the following argument. The child plays in complete--we can well say, in sacred--earnest. But it play...s and knows that it plays. The sportsman, too, plays with all the fervour of a man enraptured, but he still knows that he is playing. The actor on the stage is wholly absorbed in his playing, but is all the time conscious of "the play." The same holds true of the violinist, though he may soar to realms beyond the world. The play-character, therefore may attach to the sublimest forms of action. Can we now extend the line to ritual and say that the priest performing the rites of sacrifice is only playing? At first sight it seems preposterous, for if you grant it for one religion you must grant it for all. Hence our ideas of ritual, magic, liturgy, sacrament, mystery would all fall within the play concept.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have... lived in a cave and worn skins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the... action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that, thr...ough them, had come into final collision. Back of Robert E. Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life. Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition.... Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were self-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past but who had a sharp eye for the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home--so close and so small that they cannot be seen ...on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Vietnam, some of us lost control of our lives. I want my life back. I almost feel like I've been missing in action for twenty-t...wo years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power throug...h his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »