#counter

Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their mothers, and the decision to give them at church what they can find in any self-help book appears now as a choice to abandon the One in whose honor the church gathers. What they need is to be set free from themselves with finality and to be lost in the awesome wonder of the manifest presence of God. It was never God’s desire that He would sit on the sideline and watch us frantically devise impressive ways to reach people or simply hold the line on orthodoxy as though faithfulness can exist in a vacuum apart from fruitfulness. God is the Matter of first importance! Can you say that about your current weekly encounter with church? ↗

— James MacDonald

#encounter #focus #god #task #vision

LONG LIVE... This country is but a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulcher. In my country, tender proofs of spring and badly dressed birds are preferred to far-off goals. Truth waits for dawn beside a candle. Window glass is neglected. To the watchful, what does it matter? In my country, we don't question a man deeply moved. There is no malignant shadow on the capsized boat. A cool hello is unknown in my country. We borrow only what can be returned increased. There are leaves, many leaves, on the trees in my country. The branches are free to bear no fruits. We don't believe in the good faith of the victor. In my country, we say thank you. ↗

— René Char

#counter-sepulcher #madness #spirit #the-dawn-breakers #trees

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable. ↗

— Richard Avedon

#art #between #control #encounter #i

...a sensual life is a ghostly existence where you live on the surface and your soul passes through everything, touching nothing ... ↗

— John Geddes

#sensual-life #soul #superficial #wise-words #life

As an actor, when you encounter a psychopathic personality, you naturally want to make him 'bigger than life,' as the Americans say. ↗

— Antonio Banderas

#bigger #encounter #him #life #make

Sometimes, when you have someone behind the counter who's supposed to assist you and help you out, just being completely bored and uninterested - sometimes it's a little bit frustrating, you know? ↗

— Caroline Dhavernas

#behind #being #bit #bored #completely

According to Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts. ↗

— Ferdinand Mount

#action #against #bin #bush #chief

I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions. ↗

— Edward Norton

#always #angry #because #come #contradictions

Whenever I go on a show with a comedian I just counter punch. ↗

— Bill O'Reilly

#counter #go #i #just #punch

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#assertive #began #both #british #canada