I began to expand my personal service in the church, and to search more diligently for a closer relationship with God among my dif...ferent business, professional and political interests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of cons...titution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we wou...ld not let "born again" patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who wants always to look at a cafe or an altar or an oak tree with the first innocence and the limited understanding of a naive lo...vesick girl, or a born-again Byron? Five minutes or five centuries from now, we will see changeless realities with new eyes, and the sounds of sheep bleating and a new child's wail will be the same but heard through new ears. How can we pretend to be changeless, then?... Is it wrong to see the phony, painted mushroom-bollard on the quay and accept it, as part of the whole strong song that keeps on singing there, in spite of wars and movies and the turtling-on of time?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-a...gain regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer ... its anti-intellectualism ... its puerile hymns ... and its faith-healing ... are made to order for King Kid America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe a man is born first unto himself--for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty thin...gs are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »