James Carroll Quotes

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough ... The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy.

American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war.

Saint Paul lives in the Christian imagination as the chief sponsor of Christian contempt for Jews, the avatar of law versus grace, flesh versus spirit, works versus faith, Moses versus Jesus, the Old Covenant versus the New. This brutal dichotomizing was attributed to Paul most influentially by Martin Luther, who used a perceived Jewish legalism, materialism, and obsession with externals as stand-ins for the decadence of his nemesis, the pope. "Because the Papists, like the Jews," he wrote, "insist that anyone wishing to be saved must observe their ceremonies, they will perish like the Jews."39 After Luther, both Protestants and Catholics read Paul as the preeminent tribune of Jewish corruption - a misreading that had terrible consequences, especially in Luther's Germany, where the Volk were defined in ontological opposition to Juden. Paul's

Not satisfied with endlessly pulling drowning men from the torrents rushing past, Day went upstream to see who was throwing the poor bastards into the water in the first place - and

Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

The absence of Jesus is the mode of his presence.

Restlessness, therefore, is not to be regretted, but marshaled. Humans live toward.

There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

The whole story of human and personal progress is an unmitigated tale of denials today-denials of rest, denials or repose and comfort and ease and pleasure-that tomorrow may be richer.

Scientific naturalism has proven incapable of accounting for a whole range of human experiences, from simple self-awareness to love.

A naive belief in supernatural powers has been dispelled,

Indeed, an ecumenical spirit extending to the worldly, to the flawed, to the politically compromised, and to the sexually stigmatized was what separated Jesus from his rigorously puritanical mentor.

The nobility of what humans could be capable of, if only they weren't human.

Asked to describe the Holy One, Jesus told the story of the father whose bond with his son, no matter the son's unworthiness, was unbreakable.

Back home, this Catholic kid was accustomed to a Protestant culture's condescension, but here he could see for himself the world-historic glories of Catholicism ... [A Catholic American soldier's reaction to seeing St. Peter's Basilica during WWII.]

It takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the coalition is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement. The war itself is the American war crime.

Discipleship is a commitment to the memory and presence of Jesus Christ that makes a difference in how a life is lived, driving thought and behavior week in and week out.

Experience is a flow from event to consequence, with moral events defined by human choice.

The I AM of God, of Jesus, is the "I am" of every person, and it consists in every person being aware of herself or himself.

Humans are reeds of straw who think. Reeds of straw who know. Reeds of straw who choose. Reeds of straw who love. Reeds of straw who willingly surpass themselves.

To each one, the encounter with Jesus is unique, however it occurs. That no one possesses Jesus, or fully understands him, is why the movement toward Jesus can never be made alone.

the grace of what makes him different, is what enables him to "stand up.

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted.

There are so many flaws, .. I don't think they can be fixed.

For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where He is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility.

This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications.8

The New Testament, that is, was made by the Church; the Church was not made by the New Testament. That is why, speaking generally, Catholics differ from Protestants in the importance given to the authority of the Bible on the one hand, and to the authority of the Church on the other. Therefore, Catholics more than Protestants would tend to say that the community has authority over its normative literature.