Fragmentation Quotes

An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

Trauma narratives are hallmarked by fragmentation, broken chronology, changing perspectives, shifts in tone, and absented moments. I ~ Adam Johnson

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things. ~ Jonathan Raban

Earlyworm rolled the words along the table like a fragmentation grenade. ~ Keith Laumer

I am touched by her life, how it moves forward, pulses and springs. There is no fragmentation, nothing stunted or wedged. I circle back, I regress, the past doesn't let go. It might as well be a malfunction, a scene repeating itself, a scratched vinl record, a stutter. ~ Leila Aboulela

A more general statement of Davies's point would be that when institutions and meaning systems are threatened or disrupted, it may not be the case that entirely new ones will be created; one response may simply be a greater emphasis on preexisting cultural traits and distinctions...Thus, Wuthnow's (1987) "breakdowns of the moral order" may not produce new ideologies; it may reinvigorate old ones, including old hatreds that were assumed to have vanished from the modern world. The increasing fragmentation and resurgent ethnicity of the former Eastern bloc gives evidence of this. The concept of "ethnic cleansing" represents community with a vengeance. ~ Wendy Griswold

Not only is natural burial by far the most ecologically sound way to perish, it doubles down on the fear of fragmentation and loss of control. Making the choice to be naturally buried says, 'Not only am I aware that I'm a helpless, fragmented mass of organic matter, I celebrate it. Vive la decay!' ~ Caitlin Doughty

If we are going to inquire into that, (religion, i.e. a life in which there is no fragmentation whatsoever) we must not only be free of all belief, but also we must be very clear about the distorting factor of all effort, direction and purpose. ~ Krishnamurti

Without a home, everything is fragmentation. -John Berger ~ Louisa Thomsen Brits

I think she was mistaken when she said I was torturing myself. I think that she interpreted me fragmentarily, which is worse than not to interpret at all. ~ Leonora Carrington

When men and women fail to form stable marriages, the result is a vast
expansion of government attempts to cope with the terrible social needs that result.
There is scarcely a dollar that the state and federal government spends on social
programs that is not driven, in large part, by family fragmentation: crime, poverty,
drug abuse, teen pregnancy, school failure, mental and physical health problems. ~ Maggie Gallagher

Middle East by the Arab Muslim caliphate, ending with Muslim fragmentation and the Iranian Buyid capture of Abbasid Baghdad, saw Muslim and Maronite establishment in Mount Lebanon. ~ William Harris

As the connections have been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness. And there is work that is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of connections - as one is now said to work "for a living" or "to support a family" - but the enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love. (pg. 133, The Body and the Earth) ~ Wendell Berry

Christian salvation consists in works. To be saved is to be made holy. To be saved requires our being made part of a people separated from the world so that we can be united in spite of - or perhaps better, because of - the world's fragmentation and divisions. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

Unity consciousness is a state of enlightenment where we pierce the mask of illusion which creates separation and fragmentation. Behind the appearance of separation is one unified field of wholeness. Here the seer and the scenery are one. ~ Deepak Chopra

Pornography and obscenity ... work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground
situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks. ~ Marshall McLuhan

An overwhelming number of economists, international civil servants, and policy-makers argue that a fragmentation of the Eurozone would cause a new depression and massive wealth destruction around the world. It would also end the period of economic integration that has characterized world politics since the end of the Cold War. ~ Klaus Schwab

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way. ~ Matthew Pearl

Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

The sage sees only the Self. The person sees lots of persons. One sees from wholeness, one sees from fragmentation. Both are you. ~ Mooji

When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall.

After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers' heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn't watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank an ~ Neal Stephenson

This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli. ~ Jonathan Franzen

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

The history of the bagel suggests that Americans' shifting, blended, multi-ethnic eating habits are signs neither of postmodern decadence, ethnic fragmentation, nor corporate hegemony. If we do not understand how a bagel could sometimes be Jewish, sometimes be "New York," and sometimes be American, or why it is that Pakistanis now sell bagels to both Anglos and Tejanos in Houston, it is in part because we have too hastily assumed that our tendency to cross cultural boundaries in order to eat ethnic foods is a recent development - and a culinary symptom of all that has gone wrong with contemporary culture.

It is not. The bagel tells a different kind of American tale. It high- lights ways that the production, exchange, marketing, and consumption of food have generated new identities - for foods and eaters alike. ~ Donna Gabaccia

It is hard to create community when the sheer number of options generate a system in which no one is in the same place at the same time. ~ Rebekah Nathan

Being satisfied: this is the general model of being and living whose promoters and supporters do not appreciate the fact that it generates discontent. For the quest for satisfaction and the fact of being satisfied presuppose the fragmentation of 'being' into activities, intentions, needs, all of them well-defined, isolated, separable and separated from the Whole. Is this an art of living? A style? No. It is merely the result and the application to daily life of a management technique and a positive knowledge directed by market research. The economic prevails even in a domain that seemed to elude it: it governs lived experience. ~ Henri Lefebvre

The journey of life is the unification of fragmentation. Fragments are units of power that are out of control. We make agreements to come and collect ourselves. ~ Caroline Myss

A lot of my work is about is about events, but I also think a lot of my work is about fragmentation ... You have to break something down in order to have the parts synthesize. ~ Ray Metzker

Emotional abuse can pose a threat to a person's psychological survival, particularly if that person is a child and if the emotional abuse is chronic and severe. Threat of abandonment is experienced by some as a threat to physical and/or psychological survival. This is particularly so if the victim is dependent on the person threatening abandonment, as a child may be. Incest is a form of physical and emotional abuse that threatens a child's psychological survival and sometimes even her or his physical survival. Extreme sexual or emotional abuse may produce fragmentation of identity, as in multiple personality, or psychic annihilation, as in psychosis. Threat to psychological survival can also occur, for example, when someone threatens to kill your children, when someone continues to sexually abuse your children and there is nothing you can do to stop it, or when someone prevents you from seeing your children. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

On one level my sense of despair had been dispelled by therapy, yet on another it had not been replaced by either the desire for a future or the concept of one. I felt more aware of who I was, but that in itself-dominated as it was by sensations of fragmentation and isolation-filled me with no great hope, and in many ways only fuelled an appetite for destruction. ~ Anthony Loyd

It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil. ~ Wendell Berry

The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life. ~ Os Guinness

God' is whatever is the next obvious step towards wholeness in yourself and your life; 'Ego' is whatever within you stops you taking it. ~ Oli Anderson

All true love and all sacrifice are
in their essence Nature's contradiction of the primary egoism and
its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first
fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between
creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from
which we have separated, a discovery of one's self in others.
But it is only a divine love and unity that can possess in the light what the human forms of these things seek for in
the darkness. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Augustine's feeling of fragmentation has its modern corollary in the way many contemporary young people are plague by a frantic fear of missing out. The world has provided them with a superabundance of neat things to do. Naturally, they hunger to size every opportunity and taste every experience. They want to grab all the goodies in front of them. They want to say yes to every product in the grocery store. They are terrified of missing out on anything that looks exciting. But by not renouncing any of them they spread themselves thin. What's worse, they turn themselves into goodie seekers, greedy for every experience and exclusively focused on self. If you live in this way, you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to sau a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes. ~ David Brooks

At the heart of the durability of mass schooling is a brilliantly designed power fragmentation system which distributes decision-making so widely among so many different warring interests that large-scale change is impossible to those without a codebook. ~ John Taylor Gatto

We have considered the problem of mental fragmentation and arbitrariness that results when our contact with the world is mediated by representations: representations collapse the basic axis of proximity and distance by which an embodied being orients in the world and draws a horizon of relevance around itself. We noted the prominence of a design philosophy that severs the bonds between action and perception, as in contemporary automobiles that insulate us from the sensorimotor contingencies by which an embodied being normally grasps reality. The case of machine gambling gave us a heightened example of this kind of abstraction, and made clear how such a design philosophy can be turned to especially disturbing purposes in the darker precincts of "affective capitalism," where our experiences are manufactured for us. We saw that the point of these experiences is often to provide a quasi-autistic escape from the frustrations of life, and that they are especially attractive in a world that lacks a basic intelligibility because it seems to be ordered by "vast impersonal forces" that are difficult to bring within view on a first-person, human scale. I argued that all of this tends to sculpt a certain kind of contemporary self, a fragile one whose freedom and dignity depend on its being insulated from contingency, and who tends to view technology as magic for accomplishing this. For such a self, choosing from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with thing ~ Matthew B. Crawford

He believed a kind of fragmentation had crept into people's minds in the modern era. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

The move to render the presence of lesbians and gay men invisible in the intricate fabric of Black existence and survival is a move which contributes to fragmentation and weakness in the Black community. ~ Audre Lorde

We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling - religious myths, opera, film - and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words. ~ Doug Aitken

I don't really care about interruptions. I accept technology, and I don't turn things off. I've found a peace with fragmentation and a harmony with switching gears quickly to other things. ~ Doug Aitken

Erwin Strauss, in his brilliant monograph on obsession, similarly earlier showed how repulsed Swift was by the animality of the body, by its dirt and decay. Straus pronounced a more clinical judgment on Swift's disgust, seeing it as part of the typical obsessive's worldview: "For all obsessives sex is severed from unification and procreation....Through the...isolation of the genitals from the whole of the body, sexual functions are experienced as excretions and as decay." This degree of fragmentation is extreme, but we all see the world through obsessive eyes at least part of the time and to some degree; and as Freud said, not only neurotics take exception to the fact that "we are born between urine and feces." In t his horror of the incongruity of man Swift the poet gives more tormented voice to the dilemma that haunts us all, and it is worth summing it up one final time: Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man's utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant female beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out-the eye that gave even the dry Darwi ~ Ernest Becker

On the Net, the bell curve reclaims its tails. The uncommon is as accessible as the common. The very fragmentation of the Internet allows us to find ourselves in other people - and to know that we are not alone. ~ Virginia Postrel

Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline. ~ Robert Payne

A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation. ~ Lorin Stein

Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned. ~ Enoch Powell

Any incremental increase in the siphoning of resources, without productive deployment, is likely to enhance due fragmentation of the resource with a higher and ir-repairable increase in entropy. ~ Priyavrat Thareja

If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong. ~ James Surowiecki

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Symptoms of chronic stress are feelings of fragmentation and of chasing after time - of not being able to be present. What we are looking for is a settled, joyful state of being, and we need to give this state space. The Archbishop once told me that people often think he needs time to pray and reflect because he is a religious leader. He said those who must live in the marketplace - business people, professionals and workers - need it even more. ~ Desmond Tutu

Life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It's not really random at all. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Avoid fragmentation: Find your focus and seek simplicity. Purposeful living calls for elegant efficiency and economy of effort-expanding the minimum time and energy necessary to achieve desired goals. ~ Dan Millman

Our universities advocate fragmentation in their course systems. ~ Arthur Erickson

But if he is angry at the world for doing him harm, why does he take it out on his loving partner? Couldn't he just as readily express his rage by playing racquetball or pounding pillows. His ideas about her role seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the narcissistic husband has vested his wife with tremendous power. She is necessary for his self-repair, but instead of valuing her and seeking comfort in her arms, he beats and humiliates her. Because he sees her as available to meet any and all of his needs, he releases his rage and any self-hate at her; such an act helps him ultimately feel powerful again, making him realize he is not weak and shattered.
When the narcissistic man eels the terror and rage associated with his own internal fragmentation, his outburst restores his sense of power and control. He turns the anger expanding within him away from himself, toward his wife. He insists that she's the defective one, she's to blame, because she has not met his needs. Such acts of externalization are key to the NPD batterer. His violent behavior restores his self-esteem. He believes that his actions are not his fault; he is just trying to take care of himself. ~ Susan Weitzman

When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are are released from desire and fear. And your life becomes harmonious, centered and affirmative. Even with suffering.

The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva - the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell

As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people. ~ Geraldine Brooks

Q: Why is it we all so desperately want to be loved?
Krishnamurti: Because we are so desperately empty, lonely.

Q: But you say that loving is more important than being loved.
Krishnamurti: Yes, of course – which means one must understand this emptiness, this loneliness in oneself. A mind that is self-concerned with its own ambitions, greeds, fears, guilt, suffering has no capacity to love. A mind that is divided in itself, that lives in fragments, obviously cannot love. Division implies sorrow; it is the root cause of sorrow – division between 'you' and 'me', 'we' and 'they', the black, the white, the brown and so on. So wherever there is division, fragmentation, love cannot be, because goodness is a state of non-division. The world itself is indivisible. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

What is acted out on the female body parallels the larger practices of domination, fragmentation, and conquest against the earth body, which is being polluted, strip-mined, deforested, and cut up into parcels of private property. Equally, this pattern points to the fragmentation of the psyche, which ultimately underlies and enables all of this damage. ~ Jane Caputi

Sephora's Psychoactive Fall Line {Couplet}
Sephora has a new Krazy-Glue to hold together the mind's fragmentation,
and a firming cream to deal with the stretch marks of imagination. ~ Beryl Dov

We all share the wound of fragmentation. And we can all share in the cure of unification. Healing is the unification of all our forces
the powers of being, feeling, knowing and seeing. ~ Gabrielle Roth

So when we make contact with the domain of being in the meditation practice, we are already, in a profound sense, beyond the scarring, beyond the isolation and fragmentation and suffering we may be experiencing. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perfectly, because when each speaks a language unrelated to that of the other - when language is not the basis of the communication that shapes our being - the only outcome can be fragmentation. In that sense, postmodernism is modernity come home to roost. ~ Colin E. Gunton

Where does the fragmentation of a dysfunctional family begin? I believe it begins before the family does. I believe the wounds are already there, waiting to be cut into existence by the meeting of two unsuitable people and the birth of the children they go on to create with a love that is potent in its powers of destruction. ~ Rachel Moran

Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. ~ Danah Boyd

Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn't unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to. ~ John Green

It's television, after all. No one is dead, even when they die. ~ Chris Campanioni

When I edit the poems - and I do edit, which some people don't mean when they use the term "stream of consciousness" - I'm usually editing toward greater accuracy, which sometimes means more fragmentation, because that is the way I think. ~ Rachel Zucker

Not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There's been a fragmentation of how the market functions, but I believe printed books are here to stay. People like the tactile experience, the smell of them; there's a great romance to them. ~ Jonathan Galassi

Because if you are fragmented and uncertain it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. Survival in a desert, then, requires that you lose this fragmentation, and fast. It is not a mystical experience, or rather, it is dangerous to attach these sorts of words to it. ~ Robyn Davidson

Dominance functions best in a culture of disconnections and fragmentation. Feminism recognizes connections. Imagine ~ Carol J. Adams

We're still a long way from knowing where our clicks will lead us. But it's clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists - that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding - should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes. ~ Nicholas Carr

Eighteen pockets in one suit? I haven't the time. ~ A.A. Milne

You see, another reason for nationalization was that private ownership meant fragmentation. ~ Barbara Castle

Peasant families were close-knit. However, as the Black Death swept through village after village, it became difficult for young peasants to find spouses. The fragmentation of families by illness, coupled with new economic mobility, led many young men to move to the city.

"In England, many noblemen encouraged this migration by converting their land to raising livestock rather than farming, evicting their tenants and closing down entire villages ...

"...Sometimes a village was abandoned because the surrounding soils were depleted and ceased to yield good crops. In other locations, the decline in populations caused by the Black Death lowered food prices and made farming unprofitable.

"But whatever the reason, once a village was abandoned, most of its peasants headed for the city to try to make their living. And as migration increased and the cities grew in size and importance, many noblemen decided to move their too ... however, in the city, nobles discovered that their relationship with the lower classes had changed. Men had opportunities for advancement regardless of social class; the manorial system did not exist in urban centers of growth and progress. ~ Patricia D. Netzley

The future of peace and prosperity that we seek for all the world's peoples needs a foundation of tolerance, security, equality and justice. ~ Kofi Annan

In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important - and often more profitable - than to be civil or creative or truly original. ~ Al Gore

Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot. Or that everything was born to die. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Both the fragmentation of power and the conflicting government policies are rooted in the political realities of a democratic system that operates by enacting detailed and specific legislation. Such a system tends to give undue political power to small groups that have highly concentrated interests, to give greater weight to obvious, direct, and immediate effects of government action than to possibly more important but concealed, indirect, and delayed effects, to set in motion a process that sacrifices the general interest to serve special interests, rather than the other way around. There is, as it were, an invisible hand in politics that operates in precisely the opposite direction to Adam Smith's invisible hand. Individuals who intend only to promote the general interest are led by the invisible political hand to promote a special interest that they had no intention to promote. ~ Milton Friedman

Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world. ~ Lauren Groff

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage. ~ Klaus Schwab

Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different. ~ David Bohm

With the fragmentation of television audiences and the advent of cable and on-demand services, the prestige of being an anchor is not what it was in the days of Walter Cronkite. ~ Jill Abramson

I recognized that Christianity had taught me that sacrifice is the way of life. I forgot the neighbor who raped me, but I could see that when theology presents Jesus' death as God's sacrifice of his beloved child for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive.

But what if this is not true? What if nothing, or very little, is saved? What if the consequence of sacrifice is simply pain, the diminishment of life, fragmentation of the soul, abasement, shame? What if the severing of life is merely destructive of life and is not the path of love, courage, trust, and faith? What if the performance of sacrifice is a ritual in which some human beings bear loss and others are protected from accountability or moral expectations? ~ Rebecca Ann Parker