Quotes from James Carroll

Tradition, meaning, and relevance

To be human, therefore, is to be on the way to becoming something else.

reasons, Edith Stein is the saint who, instead of advancing Jewish-Christian relations, impedes them. Until the Church accomplishes a complete reckoning with a past that reaches far beyond the Holocaust, Edith Stein, instead of blessing the Church, will haunt it.

the way evolution has always worked, a "secular" process in which life's most sacred secret is embedded.

Compassion: she suffered with. Companion: she broke bread with. Conspiracy: she breathed with. Conscience: she knew with. And finally, consistent with this ethic of imitation

jovial air clashed with her mood. She would have liked to greet him with friendly goodwill, but managed

Kierkegaard wrote of "eternal consciousness"; the French sociologist Émile Durkheim of "collective consciousness"; the British writer H. G. Wells of a "world brain"; the French philosopher Edouard Le Roy of the "noosphere"—which the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called a "new skin" on the earth.

The shame I feel as a Catholic Christian, aware in detail of the ways that the Church sanctified the hatred of Jews, not only betraying Jesus but tilling the soil out of which would come the worst crime in history, is shame not only at what my people did, but at what I can now admit I might well have done myself. When, on

those devoted to Jesus of Galilee ultimately made an unnecessary enemy of one whose very name most eloquently honors him: Galileo Galilei.

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.]

had come here with my three questions. The first: How did the history of Christian antisemitism contribute to the Holocaust? The second: How did the Church abet, or oppose, the Holocaust as it unfolded? And the third: How does the Church today negotiate that layered past, both the deep past of antisemitism and the recent past of the Holocaust? With Edith Stein, that

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

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.

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

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.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things...but there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

Real generosity toward the future," as Camus famously put it, "lies in giving all to the present.

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.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. —Joyce Carol Oates

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.

There is no such thing as history undistorted. Decisive transformations of meaning occurred, and are occurring still.

she had discovered within herself the unlikely gift for functioning with equilibrium and efficiency inside a full-blown, unending nightmare. [A Red Cross worker during WWII in Italy]

The absence of Jesus is the mode of his presence.