Quotes from Parker J. Palmer

My core religious beliefs include this simple article of faith: the God who gave all of us life wants us to do the same for each other.

The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials is a profoundly moral regimen. John Middleton Murray put this truth into words that challenge the conventional concept of goodness to its core: "For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a straight and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.

ontology, epistemology, pedagogy, and ethics

The God I know is the source of reality, rather than morality; the source of 'what is' rather than the source of 'what ought to be'.

is not a voracious capitalism but the spiritual insight that we cannot buy the identity and security we seek.

I will not pretend that I find it easy to embrace this fact. Get me going on politicians who distort my faith tradition to win votes or on racial bigots and homophobes who want to translate their personal shadows into public policy, and this nice Quaker boy from the Midwest does a passable imitation of the Incredible Hulk.

Our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are a part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious of having them than we are of breathing.

Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community not only creates abundance – community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature,the human world might be transformed