Quotes from Dennis P. Hollinger

God is both transcendent (beyond us) and immanent (near us).

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. He feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at his disposal, more knowledge, more technique than ever, it turns out that the world today goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts.41

There is a tendency today to turn moral issues into amoral ones, to argue that many of the decisions and choices we make are merely personal choices that lie outside the ethical purview. For example, in the current debate about euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, some argue that this is not a moral issue but simply a matter of controlling one's life. Ethical questions need not be raised.

we must be open to the fact that in regard to some ethical judgments, our focus will be more on the wise, judicious course of action than on the absolute right course of action.

as Lewis Smedes once pointed out, "We have no ideal world in which to find out what God expects us to do; we have only this changing and broken one. . . . And obedience to unchanging commands must adjust to changing conditions."11 But that in no way implies that the moral and theological guides are themselves relativistic, sometimes binding and at other times not.

Pastoral care cannot be reduced to ethics, and ethics cannot be reduced to pastoral care. If we reduce our care to ethics, we will lack empathy, love, and understanding in applying ethical norms to people's lives; if we reduce ethics to pastoral care, we will end up with a minimalistic ethic of shallow love or humanistic care.