The general blessedness of his life

I want to live with the grace and thankfulness of the Reverend Boughton in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home:
The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular sorrow. (p. 3)
This quote doesn’t get close enough [...]

If anybody do go to heaven, they will

There’s a delightful scene in Thomas Hardy’s nineteenth century novel, Far from the madding crowd, the funniest one in the entire novel, where some of the farm workers sitting in the pub get to discussing religion, just as Joseph Poorgrass is meant to be delivering Fanny’s coffin to the cemetery. The ‘chapel-goers’ they talk about [...]

quote about angst

George Maloney writes in Inward Stillness p. 131:
Man’s instinct does not tell him, as animal’s instinct does, what he must do. Because he has to cut himself off from the roots of his past by throwing away traditions, he is at a loss as to what he ought to do. Usually he finds himself in [...]

Quote: pastors as shopkeepers

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with a shopkeeper’s concerns – how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from the competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out [...]