Recent posts in Quote for the Day
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
She gets £80 a week and she’s drowning in unpaid bills; she’s got nothing left to sell, she’s crying a lot and the kids want cheese-chips so she’s bloody well giving them some. Jamie stands in the kitchen as Natasha cries. “Come here,” he says, moving to give her a comforting hug. “Get off,” she says, pushing him away, denying the producers their “crank up the Snow Patrol, here’s the heart-warming bit”.
“Sorry, I’m just embarrassed,” Natasha says eventually. “I don’t know how it gets like this. I really try with money, I do.” Jamie, the multi-millionaire, hovers, trying to think of something to say. “Look,” he begins, “I’m not going to say to you that I understand, because… well, erm, I don’t.” Other Rotherham residents point this out, too. “The thing with you, Jamie,” another woman tells him, “is you live in a bubble. You’ve got no bloody idea what it’s like for us.” Well, if he didn’t, it’s dawning on him now and I still think he’s an amazing man for trying.
h/t: Scott via The Guardian
Notes for non-Brits: Jamie Oliver is a celebrity chef who has been working for a while trying to improve the nations nutrition whilst at the same time being the multi-million pound face of a major supermarket advertising campaign.
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Sunday, August 31st, 2008
Good comment from kawika:
Recently in a group we asked the question of ourselves, “What difference does christianity make to how I live?”. For me, this has a lot to do with questioning my values by using the life of Jesus for reflection.
Regarding wealth, the values I am often tempted to identify as being “christian values” are actually societal values that have been cultivated within me. Because I also strongly identify with being a “christian”, and because my parents and peers who cultivated these values in me are also “christians” , it can often be a natural extension that such values are also “christian”. But they aren’t.
The strong value placed upon saving money, earning high interest, buying a car, owning a house (the “Australian dream” — a noticeable hint that this is a societal value, not a faith-based one), accumulating “things”, insuring those “things” against theft/damage — these are all societal, not christian, values.
h/t: wecan.be
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Friday, July 25th, 2008
When I was working as a priest, it seemed sometimes that people thought they were paying me to be “church” so that they did not have to be. They wanted me to do all the things they felt should be done, but they did not want to do themselves: visit their elderly parents, teach their children, increase attendance, give to the poor, preach the gospel, etc. etc. I began to think that Anglican clergy get called vicar (short for vicarious?) because their congregations want someone to be good on their behalf.
Now for the joke:
When I was a pastor, I was paid to be good.
Now, I’m good for nothing.
h/t quester
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Monday, June 30th, 2008
Eugene Peterson is the genius who completed, mostly by himself, pretty much the only readable translation of the Bible into American English. It’s called The Message. He talks about that, and about story and other things, in this video of an interview with him last year. He said:
But the imagination is almost, not quite, the same thing as faith. It’s that which connects what we see and what we don’t see and pulls us through what we see into what we don’t see. Now when that imagination then becomes/involves trust and participation it’s faith. But imagination is the training ground for that. So that’s why I think novelists, poets–we ought to ordain them.
What roles do story and imagination play in making the world a more just, peaceful place?
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Sunday, June 8th, 2008
“Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”
- Robert Kennedy, To Seek a Newer World, 1968
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Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
“I’d put my money on solar energy… I hope we don’t have to wait ’til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
- Thomas Edison, in conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, March 1931
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Thursday, April 24th, 2008
“The greatest sin of political imagination is thinking there is no other way except the filthy rotten system we have today.”
- Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals
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Thursday, April 17th, 2008
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference - so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked…I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
- Frederick Douglass, 1845
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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
“Sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so that their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them.”
- Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906
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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
We find ourselves stuck in a hopeless paradigm, where it feels necessary to empathise with the sensibilities of the aggressor so as not to sound “unpatriotic”, while remaining blind to the untold anguish of the victims. Some actually feel the need to go so far as to blame the Iraqis for their own misfortune
From Ramzy (Warning: Graphic photos of Iraq War Violence)
I never noticed this analogy before. But Ramzy, in describing something about America, has also managed to describe something about abusive family systems, where the perpetrator is protected and sympathized with, and we try to ignore the state of the victim (for terror, I suppose, of having to acknowledge our own victimization).
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