Quotes About Understanding

Parents must get across the idea that I love you always, but sometimes I do not love your behavior.

lower my voice instead of raise it, model flexibility rather than impatience, embrace my child rather than my frustration. I

All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it's with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.

One needs to be briefed before one talks to writers

Reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic as well as ethical potential.

Religion has been defined as designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting. Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, 'I really like that' or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.

compassion can be felt in the gut; mercy needs to be enacted with the body.

By seeing Jesus as a Jew with regard to both belief and practice, Christians can develop a deeper appreciation for the teachings of the church.

Conversations across religions need not, and should not, end with all participants proclaiming an ultimate unity of belief. Such an exercise only waters down both traditions into a bland universalism that, in an attempt to be inoffensive, winds up offending everyone.

Conversion is a matter of the heart, not of the academy; polemics function more to "speak to the choir" and shore up internal unity rather than to facilitate understanding, let alone to show love of neighbor.

Christian missionaries who seek to bring Jews the "good news of Jesus" do not do so because they hate Jews; they do so because they love Jews. On the other hand, the message that Jews are not "complete" or "fulfilled" unless they accept Jesus as the Messiah is not likely to be received by most Jews with great warmth; it is tantamount to telling Christians that their religion is incomplete or erroneous without acceptance of the Qur'an. Thus,

If one person contends that there is no anti-Jewish teaching in the New Testament but another insists that there is, who's right? Who gets to speak? Unlike Nazi newspapers and KKK pamphlets, the New Testament prompts different reactions from people of goodwill. For

The best way of evangelizing is not to tell the potential convert, "Here's what's wrong with your tradition." The best way to evangelize is to show that potential convert, "Here's what's right with my tradition; here's how it prompts toward action; here's how it consoles.

According to Matthew, in order to understand Jesus, we must also understand King David.

holy envy," that is, the appreciation of the beliefs and practices of another.2

There is little reason to argue over who has the correct reading here. Isaiah's words will mean, and should mean, different things to different people over time. Moreover, different translations necessarily give rise to different interpretations, and translation itself is an act of interpretation.

we should be able to look at nature as part of God's creation, as given to us in trust, as testifying to the divine while it is not itself divine. We get all this and more when we look at the nature miracles the Gospels record. Each one tells us something about Christ, but each one also tells us something about understanding the Scriptures of Israel, and each one also tells us something about ourselves.

Anti-Jewish and potentially anti-Jewish rhetoric goes unnoticed in so much Christian scholarship because the authors are not attuned to how their words sound to different ears. The

But until I experienced what I now understand to be a true blessing, a glimpse into the future, I did not really understand love or life. Love, I learn, transcends this life and life transcends all that we perceive-which means, of course, that both go beyond the limitations of corporeal experience.

A good lover will do that, see something worthwhile in you that you never knew was there. And when there's something you don't like to see in yourself a good lover won't see it either.

If you wish to heal your sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of others. They are looking to you for guidance, help, courage, strength, understanding, and for assurance. Most of all, they are looking to you for love. He smiled.

Once innocence--an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.

It is beautiful to capture the soul of another being, isn't it? i nod and add, particularly when it has been a special person. We are talking about friendship, that has its own tenets so we are not talking about romantic/love/sex capture of another soul but the true captivation of another's spirit, which happens between people of the same sex sometimes.

Sí, acabo de comprender, mi buen aprendiz. El dinero se necesita, ya que el mundo está así montado. Pero el dinero vale por lo que da a cambio y no se le debe amar en sí.