Quotes About Faith

the world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

But what these men chant Nick half grasps, and when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows. The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true. In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.

When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don't belong to you anyway. It's not yours to hide.

just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court.

But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.

And she takes him like someone who's sure that life has need of her.

She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal with during the day, if she said those words before bed, she'd be ready for anything the next morning.

From the first leaping figure in the strings, Els heard again the problem with music. Even the slightest tune sounded like a story. Melody played on the brain like a weather report, an avowal of faith, gossip, a manifesto. The tale came across, clearer than words. But there was no tale.

THEIR FIRSTBORN DIES in infancy, killed by a thing that doesn't yet have a name. There are no microbes, yet. God is the lone taker of children, snatching even placeholder souls from one world to the other, according to obscure timetables.

Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

She hears him, and understands. This is science, and worth a million times more than anything any person might ever swear to you.

The third Hoel photographer keeps on taking pictures, just as he keeps going to church long after deciding that the entire faithful world has been duped by fairy tales. His pointless photographic ritual gives Frank Jr.'s life a blind purpose that even farming cannot give. It's a monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life.

Utah. She has followed back roads from Las Vegas, capital of clueless sinners, toward Salt Lake, capital of cunning saints.

She has followed back roads from Las Vegas, capital of clueless sinners, toward Salt Lake, capital of cunning saints.

Her mind has nothing even faintly resembling a plan. But she remembers what Jesus said about the flowers, and not worrying about tomorrow.

world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time.

The turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.

He saw a cross on a wall with another cross behind it, a shadow cross, the shadow of what God left behind when God was gone, the continued need for joy and beauty, a commitment to hope where there appeared to be none, and to grace in spite of everything.

Walk on, walk on With hope in your heart And you'll never walk alone

We saw people -- they were so far away but we knew they were people, they were not cinders or the leaves of calendars; we saw people who had no alternatives but to consign their bodies -- their bodies, I say, but I mean their lives -- to the air, people who are loved, I believe, by God, even as I believe their murderers are loved by God. Falling.

By the waters of baptism, the active European was entirely absorbed within the contemplation of the Indian. The faith that Europe imposed in the sixteenth century was, by virtue of the Guadalupe, embraced by the Indian. Catholicism has become an Indian religion. By the twenty-first century, the locus of the Catholic Church, by virtue of numbers, will be Latin America, by which time Catholicism itself will have assumed the aspect of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Brown skin.

In solitude, at last, we're able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence

What some now call 'emerging Christianity' or 'the emerging church' is not something you join, establish, or invent. You just name it and then you see it everywhere- already in place! Such nongroup groups, the 'two or three' gathered in deep truth, create a whole new level of affiliation, dialogue, and friendship...