“To lament is to come alongside those who grieve, to sit with them (literally and figuratively) in the silence and to recognize there that in God’s interconnected creation, their pain is our pain … To lament is not to offer words of comfort; it is not to try and fix the problem or to prevent it from ever happening again.”
– C. Christopher Smith & John Pattison in Slow Church p.115
“Nationalism is a shortcut around our call to be peacemakers.”
– C. Christopher Smith & John Pattison in Slow Church p.108
“[T]he good ends for which we are striving can’t be separated from our means.”
– C. Christopher Smith & John Pattison in Slow Church p.90
“To feel at home in a place you have to have some prospect of staying there.”
– Wendell Berry quoted by C. Christopher Smith & John Pattison in Slow Church p.70
“[T]he sacrificial way of Jesus may be calling us to forsake the supersized life.”
– C. Christopher Smith & John Pattison in Slow Church p.44
Surely no sane and thoughtful person can imagine any government of our time sitting comfortably at the feet of Jesus while he is saying “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.”
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p. 319
Because (modern Christianity) has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economist that “economic forces” automatically work for the good and has assumed with the industrialists and militarists that technology determines history. It has assumed with almost everybody that “progress” is good, that it is good to be modern and up with the times. It has admired Caeser and comforted him in his depredations and defaults. But in its de facto alliance with Caeser, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.319
(E)very man who is not a mere idler or parasite is necessarily some special kind of artist.
– Ananda Coomaraswamy quote by Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.316
(The Bible) is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.311
Throughout the five hundred years since Colombus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the evangelist has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming that their causes were the same.
– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace: Christianity and the Survival of Creation p.305
Turkey Alwan Travels