Ongoing Struggle Quotes

When we reframe or reinterpret our difficulties, we can transform resignation into a source of personal empowerment. In our ongoing struggle for self-overcoming, we must harness our inner strength and creativity and assert our will in the face of challenging times. ("Check, and mate")

In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.

What is life but an ongoing war?

As Osama bin Laden puts it: "In this final phase of the ongoing struggle, the world of the infidels was divided between two superpowers--the United States and the Soviet Union. Now we have defeated and destroyed the more difficult and the more dangerous of the two. Dealing with the pampered and effeminate Americans will be easy.

Market research is an ongoing part of any business. It shouldn’t be done just when you’re launching a product or when you’re struggling with business growth.

Creation has been taken down a very different path than We [God] desired. In your world the value of the individual is constantly weighed against the survival of the system - whether political, economical, social, or religious - any system, actually. First one person, and then a few and finally even many are easily sacrificed for the good and ongoing existence of that system. In one form or another this lies behind every struggle for power every prejudice, every war, and every abuse of relationship. The 'will to power and independence' has become so ubiquitous that it is now considered normal.

I begin to fully understand the lengths to which people have gone to protect me. What I mean to the rebels. My ongoing struggle against the Capitol, which has so often felt like a solitary journey, has not been undertaken alone. I have had thousands upon thousands of people from the districts at my side. I was their Mockingjay long before I accepted the role.

A value is a direction we desire to keep moving in, an ongoing process that never reaches an end.

I begin to fully understand the lengths to which people have gone to protect me. What I mean to the rebels. My ongoing struggle against the Capitol, which has so often felt like a solitary journey, has not been understaken alone. I have had thousands upon thousands of people from the districts at my side. I was their Mockingjay long before I accepted the role.

American tourists come here and they see only the happy, beautiful Italy they want to see, and that the Italians want them to see. The party. They don’t see the scars. The ongoing struggles. Why would they? They don’t see them at home, either.

There is a minimal amount of parental emotional connection, empathy and ongoing attention which is necessary to fuel a child’s growth and development so that he or she will grow into an emotionally healthy and emotionally connected adult. Less than that minimal amount and the child becomes an adult who struggles emotionally–outwardly successful, perhaps, but empty, missing something within, which the world can’t see.

The ongoing struggle to achieve a profound harmony between the deepest and most conflicting impulses of human beings instates the murkiness of my soul. The battle against the amorphousness of sin and depravity, and seeking unity and clarity, trace their origins to the primeval fire that launched humanity. This ancient warfare for control of the soul allows me to create myself. Because of the primordial inconsistences between ecstasy and reason, I am the repentant artist of my being. I am a beardless, sensuous, and androgynous sculptor, the redeemer and the transformer of my naked self.

The struggle against racism must be an ongoing theme of the anti-rape movement, which must not only defend women of color, but the many victims of the racist manipulation of the rape charge as well. The crisis dimensions of sexual violence constitute one of the facets of a deep and ongoing crisis of capitalism. As the violent face of sexism, the threat of rape will continue to exist as long as the overall oppression of women remains an essential crutch for capitalism.

Identity confusion is defined by the SCID-D as a subjective feeling of uncertainty, puzzlement, or conflict about one's own identity. Patients who report histories of childhood trauma characteristically describe themes of ongoing inner struggle regarding their identity; of inner battles for survival; or other images of anger, conflict, and violence. P13

He thought about the ongoing struggles he was having at work and how worthless his job felt. Was he just making excuses? Was his purpose connected to his job at all?

Forgiveness is rarely this once-and-done thing. It’s an ongoing battle, a struggle to remember that love is worth more than pain, and that fighting for it matters more than a grudge.

I began praying intensely-- every night-- about my struggle with fear, asking God to set me free from its power in my life. It seemed like each night, I gained a little more strength to release a little more fear. As I began to give up fear to Him, new levels of confidence and courage came to me every single night. It was not a sudden breakthrough, or a realization that I was not as afraid as I used to be. It was something I saturated in ongoing prayer.

If the goal of sanctification is actually growing in humility and greater dependence on Christ, then the Holy Spirit is doing an excellent job. Through his ongoing struggles with indwelling sin, the maturing believer will spend many years learning that he is more sinful than he ever imagined, in order to discover that he is indeed far more loved than he ever dared to hope.

Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).

If you want to advocate for change, observe critically an ongoing struggle a group of people encounter for periods of time and formulate a solution that adequately address the problem for social justice.

There is a major difference between couples who are dealing with non-attachment-related issues and those who are engaged in intimacy struggles. While the first couples want to find a common ground and reach a resolution that will bring them closer together, the latter either engage in ongoing, irreconcilable fights or one of the two is forced to compromise unilaterally in areas that are near and dear to him or her.

The horse eats the grass; the lion kills the horse; the man rides the horse and kills the lion. Life is an ongoing struggle between strong and weak, predator and prey. Cooperation and trade are possible, but they are superficial interludes between more fundamental animal facts about life. As Nietzsche again puts it: “‘Life always lives at the expense of other life’—he who does not grasp this has not taken even the first step toward honesty with himself.

The fact is that the system in the metropole reproduces itself through an ongoing offensive against the people’s psyche, not in an openly fascist way, but rather through the market. Therefore, to write off entire sections of the population as an impediment to anti-imperialist struggle, simply because they don’t fit into Marx’ analysis of capitalism, is as insane and sectarian as it is un-Marxist.

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.

Indeed, our sins—hate, fear, greed, jealousy, lust, materialism, pride—can at times take such distinct forms in our lives that we recognize them in the faces of the gargoyles and grotesques that guard our cathedral doors. And these sins join in a chorus—you might even say a legion—of voices locked in an ongoing battle with God to lay claim over our identity, to convince us we belong to them, that they have the right to name us. Where God calls the baptized beloved, demons call her addict, slut, sinner, failure, fat, worthless, faker, screwup. Where God calls her child, the demons beckon with rich, powerful, pretty, important, religious, esteemed, accomplished, right. It is no coincidence that when Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, he began his entreaties with, “If you are the Son of God . . .” We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.

We’re stuck with ourselves all the time, with the thoughts that race around our brains at 10,000 mph, with our feelings, with our daily dramas and our ongoing struggles. But by thinking about someone else, authentically listening to and connecting with another person, you focus less on all your own strife and struggles. You get a break from you.

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

Once Palestinian voices began to reach wider audiences in the West, the story was quickly cast as a war of two opposing narratives, rather than a holistic and variegated history of European racism and empire and the ensuing and ongoing history of American empire, and the concomitant struggles for self-determination by colonised peoples, from Haiti to Algeria to Vietnam.

Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions.

The “Muslim speech,” as we took to calling the second major address, was trickier. Beyond the negative portrayals of terrorists and oil sheikhs found on news broadcasts or in the movies, most Americans knew little about Islam. Meanwhile, surveys showed that Muslims around the world believed the United States was hostile toward their religion, and that our Middle East policy was based not on an interest in improving people’s lives but rather on maintaining oil supplies, killing terrorists, and protecting Israel. Given this divide, I told Ben that the focus of our speech had to be less about outlining new policies and more geared toward helping the two sides understand each other. That meant recognizing the extraordinary contributions of Islamic civilizations in the advancement of mathematics, science, and art and acknowledging the role colonialism had played in some of the Middle East’s ongoing struggles. It meant admitting past U.S. indifference toward corruption and repression in the region, and our complicity in the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government during the Cold War, as well as acknowledging the searing humiliations endured by Palestinians living in occupied territory. Hearing such basic history from the mouth of a U.S. president would catch many people off guard, I figured, and perhaps open their minds to other hard truths: that the Islamic fundamentalism that had come to dominate so much of the Muslim world was incompatible with the openness and tolerance that fueled modern progress; that too often Muslim leaders ginned up grievances against the West in order to distract from their own failures; that a Palestinian state would be delivered only through negotiation and compromise rather than incitements to violence and anti-Semitism; and that no society could truly succeed while systematically repressing its women. —

back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?

If Holmes heard me, though, he gave no sign of it. He struggled with the next words. “Like a friendship, when sharing electrons in this way, both atoms become more stable. Their bond is more stable. It’s stronger than an ionic bond. They continue to share electrons, in the same way that people must continue to share experiences, emotions, and intimacy. They require ongoing effort and investment. Covalent bonds are often found in molecules; they allow individual atoms to become more than what they would be on their own.

One recurrent factor that complicated the emotions of these very bright individuals was the ongoing discrepancy between what was expected of them by their parents, grandparents, and teachers and even themselves and their frequent failure to achieve the expected success. Most of these patients had struggled since early childhood with continuing conflict between their picture of themselves as exceptionally bright and talented and their view of themselves as disappointing failures, unable to “deliver the goods” expected of them. Some had been very successful in their childhood, earning high grades and strong praise during the elementary school years, then gradually lost status and self-esteem due to increasing evidence of their difficulty in coping with the escalating demands of middle school, high school, and postsecondary schooling.

Though our initial engagement with the poor might begin with a short-term mission trip, it must not end there, because Jesus himself was known as a friend of the broken—not just a visitor. Our lives must develop an ongoing rhythm of interacting with and embracing those who are struggling.

I see our national parks as our ongoing struggle as a diverse people to create circles of reverence in a time of collective cynicism where we are wary of being moved by anything but our own clever perspective... The nature of our national parks is bound to the nature of our own humility, our capacity to stay open and curious in a world that instead beckons closure through fear. For me, humility begins as a deep recognition of all I do not know. This understanding doesn't stop me, it inspires me to ask more questions, to look more closely, to feel more fully the character of the place where I am.

It has difficulty dealing with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology. Both politicians and voters are barely able to comprehend the new technologies, let alone regulate their explosive potential. Since the 1990s the internet has changed the world probably more than any other factor, yet the internet revolution was directed by engineers more than by political parties. Did you ever vote about the internet? The democratic system is still struggling to understand what hit it, and it is unequipped to deal with the next shocks, such as the rise of AI and the blockchain revolution.

The journey to reckon with our nation's searing history of racial hatred, intolerance, and discrimination is ongoing, and there are no neutrals in that struggle. The shadow cast by Joseph Paul Franklin and his like is long and dark, so the sunlight to eradicate it must be even brighter and stronger. [p. 290]

Very few Zionist Left intellectuals see Israel as a colonial settler state. They do not attribute its “internal” regime, laws, and political culture to this central characteristic of state and society (not to mention Israel’s Apartheid nature). The majority refuses to see the Zionist movement as an ongoing colonial project.

Emotionally unavailable means not fully emotionally present. It’s struggling or being unable to access emotions healthily and as a result, being emotionally distant due to ‘walls’ which basically act as barriers to true emotional intimacy. Fully experiencing all feelings, whether good, bad, or indifferent, is avoided because they create vulnerability, so feelings are experienced often for a limited time and in bursts as opposed to consistently feeling on an ongoing basis. Emotionally unavailable equates to intimacy issues, which is being afraid of the consequences of getting truly emotionally close to someone such that to lose them would hurt.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

I’m tempted to say that I have a struggle with depression, because that’s the commonly used phrase, but it’s really more of an ongoing partnership than a struggle. Depression just hangs out with me like a lax babysitter who is ambivalent about my bedtime. Depression is a text conversation that ebbs and flows; every once in a while, Depression texts, “Have you seen this meme? It’s going to psychologically wreck you for six months. Brunch soon?” Depression is like Jiminy Cricket riding around on my shoulder, but instead of acting as my conscience, it just mumbles, “You’re bad, things are bad, and nothing will improve.” And at this point I’m just like, “…Okay.” Like, we get it, girl. Thanks!

The thing is, Max,” he said, tons of heart-wringing emotion in his eyes, “you’re even more special than I always told you. You see, you were created for a reason. Kept alive for a purpose, a special purpose.” You mean besides seeing how well insane scientists could graft avian DNA into a human egg? He took a breath, looking deep into my eyes. I coldly shut down every good memory I had of him, every laugh we’d shared, every happy moment, every thought that he was like a dad to me. “Max, that reason, that purpose is: You are supposed to save the world.” 62 Okay, I couldn’t help it. My jaw dropped open. I shut it again quickly. Well. This would certainly give weight to my ongoing struggle to have the bathroom first in the morning.

It matters to me little whether they're on the Mongolian steppe, the deserts of West Africa, the Australian Outback, the marshlands of Southeast Asia... I can't escape the feeling of nausea... And this is just the tip of the iceberg - the ongoing spectacle of humans blissfully ignorant, boisterous, over-confident, scheming, and talking big about their dominion overthe world - a suffocating, self-absorbed, vacuous place called the wrold-for-us - to say nothing of how human culture has legitimized the most horrific actions against itself, a sickening and banal drama of the exchange of bodies, the breeding of spe ies, the struggle for power, prosperity and prestige. It just keeps going on and on, no matter how many films or TV shows imagine -like a myth - the disappearance of the human.

We all consume so many purposefully crafted stories that it's easy to forget life doesn't follow conventional narrative structure. We can't wait for our climax. We don't have character arcs. We live and then we don't. There is no final culmination in success or failure. We are not curated collections of achievements or mishaps. It is not inherently wrong that we understand the world through stories. It's who we are. It is wrong not to treat our stories as living documents, as ongoing conversations. We know that our stories tend toward dichotomous patterns of black and white, so it's those structures that we need to scrutinize most actively. This isn't easy advice to take I still struggle with it. Stories are like gravity. It's hard to examine something you've felt your entire life.

Totally grasped by the divine eros, Teilhard vowed to steep himself in the sea of matter, to bathe in its fiery water, to plunge into Earth where it is deepest and most violent, to struggle in its currents, and to drink of its waters (HM, 72). Filled with impassioned love for Sophia, he dedicated himself body and soul to the ongoing work needed to transform the cosmos to a new level of consciousness and to transformative love

Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do. It is a paradox that while wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glistening depict. There can be no outer responsibility, no interruptions, only the ongoing inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity.

The feminist philosophy that has shaped my thinking has been articulated most clearly by Marilyn Frye;67 Catharine MacKinnon68 has been influential in my understanding of the law’s role; Gerda Lerner helped me understand the relationship between gender and class; and Audre Lorde69 and Barbara Smith70 challenged many of my unconscious assumptions about gender and race. Important to the struggle to bring to feminist theory and politics a deeper analysis of the complexity of all these interactions among systems of power has been Patricia Hill Collins’ 1990 book on black feminist thought and “the matrix of domination.”71 Other sources of my early understanding of these themes were the work of bell hooks, especially her 1984 book72 and her ongoing critique of “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” and the influential 1981 collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color.73 Today

LOVE is not just an acronym: it is a useful way of thinking about “love” itself. If you think of love as an ongoing process of letting go, opening up, valuing, and engaging, then it is always available to you—even when the feelings of love are absent. So in this sense of the word, you really can have everlasting love. But if you think of love merely as an emotion or feeling, then it can never last for long because all feelings and emotions continually change.

Let the struggling believer be comforted; let the apathetic church member be warned. The great evidence of true conversion is God’s ongoing work of sanctification in our lives. If we have been saved by grace through faith, we are now God’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8–10). The evidence that God has begun a good work in us is that He continues that work until that final day.28

Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be “unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.

Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?

We struggle to interpret some difficult passages, not simply because we want to weasel out of the Bible's plain demands, but also because we know that sometimes Scripture corrects Scripture. Within the canon is an ongoing argument with itself over certain subjects. In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus often pronounces, "You have heard it said [in Scripture], but I say to you . . ." Most scholars see the book of Job as an extended argument of the smug equation of good works equaling easy lives that occurs in some of the Wisdom Literature. Scripture interprets Scripture.

Birmingham has proved that no matter what you're up against, if wave after wave of black people keep coming prepared to go to jail, sooner or later there is such confusion, such social dislocation, that white people in the South are faced with a choice: either integrated restaurants or no restaurants at all, integrated public facilities or none at all. And the South then must make its choice for integration, for it would rather have that than chaos. This struggle is only beginning in the North, but it will be a bitter struggle. It will be an attack on business, on trade unions, and on the government. The Negro will no longer tolerate a situation where for every white man unemployed there are two or three Negroes unemployed. In the North, Negroes present a growing threat to the social order that, less brutally and more subtly than the South, attempts to keep him "in his place." In response, moderates today warn of the danger of violence and "extremism" but do not attempt to change conditions that brutalize the Negro and breed racial conflict. What is needed is an ongoing massive assault on racist political power and institutions.

Audre Lorde once stated, “I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womanness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.” As a woman of color, I find that some feminists don’t seem terribly concerned with the issues unique to women of color—the ongoing effects of racism and postcolonialism, the status of women in the Third World, the fight against the trenchant archetypes black women are forced into (angry black woman, mammy, Hottentot, and the like).

My husband and I have been a part of the same small group for the past five years.... Like many small groups, we regularly share a meal together, love one another practically, and serve together to meet needs outside our small group. We worship, study God’s Word, and pray. It has been a rich time to grow in our understanding of God, what Jesus has accomplished for us, God’s purposes for us as a part of his kingdom, his power and desire to change us, and many other precious truths. We have grown in our love for God and others, and have been challenged to repent of our sin and trust God in every area of our lives. It was a new and refreshing experience for us to be in a group where people were willing to share their struggles with temptation and sin and ask for prayer....We have been welcomed by others, challenged to become more vulnerable, held up in prayer, encouraged in specific ongoing struggles, and have developed sweet friendships. I have seen one woman who had one foot in the world and one foot in the church openly share her struggles with us. We prayed that God would show her the way of escape from temptation many times and have seen God’s work in delivering her. Her openness has given us a front row seat to see the power of God intersect with her weakness. Her continued vulnerability and growth in godliness encourage us to be humble with one another, and to believe that God is able to change us too. Because years have now passed in close community, God’s work can be seen more clearly than on a week-by-week basis. One man who had some deep struggles and a lot of anger has grown through repenting of sin and being vulnerable one on one and in the group. He has been willing to hear the encouragement and challenges of others, and to stay in community throughout his struggle.... He has become an example in serving others, a better listener, and more gentle with his wife. As a group, we have confronted anxiety, interpersonal strife, the need to forgive, lust, family troubles, unbelief, the fear of man, hypocrisy, unemployment, sickness, lack of love, idolatry, and marital strife. We have been helped, held accountable, and lifted up by one another. We have also grieved together, celebrated together, laughed together, offended one another, reconciled with one another, put up with one another,...and sought to love God and one another. As a group we were saddened in the spring when a man who had recently joined us felt that we let him down by not being sensitive to his loneliness. He chose to leave. I say this because, with all the benefits of being in a small group, it is still just a group of sinners. It is Jesus who makes it worth getting together. Apart from our relationship with him...,we have nothing to offer. But because our focus is on Jesus, the group has the potential to make a significant and life-changing difference in all our lives. ...When 7 o’clock on Monday night comes around, I eagerly look forward to the sound of my brothers and sisters coming in our front door. I never know how the evening will go, what burdens people will be carrying, how I will be challenged, or what laughter or tears we will share. But I always know that the great Shepherd will meet us and that our lives will be richer and fuller because we have been together. ...I hope that by hearing my story you will be encouraged to make a commitment to become a part of a small group and experience the blessing of Christian community within the smaller, more intimate setting that it makes possible. 6

White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

This is something that has been going on forever,” Craig Spencer, the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University, says about the variability of human response to infection. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people are walking about with long Epstein-Barr virus, or long influenza. We all know someone who is low energy, who’s told to work harder. We have all heard about chronic Lyme sufferers, and those with ME/CFS. But they get written off.” Spencer understands something about how infections can do long-term damage, because he contracted Ebola while working in Guinea, fell ill upon his return to New York City, and then struggled with the virus’s ongoing effects. (Studies have suggested that the Ebola virus may linger in the body for years.) The difference between long COVID and other infection-associated illnesses is that it is happening “on such a huge scale—unlike anything we’ve seen before. It is harder for the medical community to write off,” Spencer told me. Indeed, many researchers I spoke with for this book hope that the race to understand long COVID will advance our understanding of other chronic conditions that follow infection, transforming medicine in the process.

Russia’s undeclared hybrid war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, which has taken more than 14,000 lives in the past seven years, claims American and Western attention as one of the foremost manifestations of the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. The ongoing military conflict in Ukraine is not only a contest of political values. Russia’s effort to stem its imperial decline by seizing the Crimea and occupying part of the Donbas presents a major threat to international order, with its bedrock principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of nation-states, on a level not seen since the end of World War II.

When I first stopped trying to fix other people, I turned my attention to 'curing' myself. I was in a hurry to get this healing process over. I wanted immediate recovery from the effects of growing up in a family riddled with alcoholism and from being married to an alcoholic. I looked forward to the day I would graduate from Al-Anon and get on with my life. As year two and year three passed, I was still in the program. I began to despair as the character defects I had worked so long to overcome came back to haunt me, particularly during times of stress and during periods when I didn't attend meetings. I have severe arthritis in my joints. To cope with my condition, I have to assess my body each day and patiently respond to its needs. Some days I need a warm bath to get going in the morning. On other days I apply a medicated rub to the painful areas. Yet other days some light stretching and exercise help to loosen me up. I'ave accepted that my arthritis will never go away. It's a condition I manage daily with consistent, on-going care. One day I made a connection between my medical condition and my struggle with recovery. I began to look at myself as having 'arthritis of the personality,' requiring patient, continuous care to keep me from 'stiffening' into old habits and attitudes. This care includes attending meetings, reading Al-Anon literature, calling my sponsor, and engaging in service. Now, as long as I practice patience, recovery is a manageable and adventurous process instead of an arduously sought end point.

Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men—a proposal under consideration at the Vatican—it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.” But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they’ll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem.… We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn’t let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.

She used to test his commitment by hurting him. She threatened to leave him, or cheat on him, then watched his face and measured the depth of his feelings for her by the extent to which it crumbled. He was insecure; prone to worry. If he ever became confident, she thought, it would mean that he no longer loved her, since to love someone is to worry; to need someone is to fear the inevitability of their absence. Without fear, she thought, without drama, there was only the grey blankness of late-middle-age relationships, where, as far as she could make out, concepts like love and passion were replaced by what she saw as the wretched terminology of codependent ennui: companionship, contentment, compromise; where one person’s love for another was no longer stated simply because it was no longer questioned; where the key indicator not only of love but also of solidity would simply be the mere fact of the solidity and love that had gone before. No, no, she thought. Better the sense of odds, of struggle; the ongoing and repeated relief of trauma endured and survived. Without it, there was only the security of the unimaginative: an unspokenly dwindling sex life; roiling resentment; his-and-hers facial hair.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9 Recognizing and confessing sin is a normal part of the Christian life. God didn’t declare us righteous because of Christ and then leave us to wallow in sin. Rather, he has an ongoing strategy for us that involves getting rid of more and more sin. It’s like living in a dim room that appears clean, and then pulling up the shades or turning on the light, only to see that it is really dusty and dirty. Even though the room feels dirtier now than before, the dirt was there all along. When we walk in the light of the Lord and struggle to love people, we begin to see more things wrong with us. What’s more, the devil says, “There’s no hope for you. God couldn’t love somebody as bad as you.” The truth is that all along you were this bad, this messed up, and this selfish. It was only as the light came in that you saw all these problems. This is a signal, not for despair, but for hope! Don’t be depressed by what you see, but rather learn to own up to your sins by faith and disown them by confessing them. If you confess your sins, they really are forgiven. You can go forward to love others in ways you never dreamed possible.

I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the end, the more the means, in the form of the patient’s efforts, had to appear blameless in the face of failure. In this paradigm, accuracy and comparison must continually be sacrificed to acceptance and compassion; which often results in the escalation of bizarre behavior and bizarre diagnoses. The bizarre behavior results from us taking credit for everything that is positive and assigning blame elsewhere for anything negative. Because of this skewed positive-feedback loop between our judged actions and our beliefs, we systematically become more and more adapted to ourselves, our feelings, and our inaccurate solitary thinking; and less and less adapted to the environment that we share with our fellows. The resultant behavior, such as crying, depression, displays of temper, high-risk behavior, or romantic ventures, or abandonment of personal responsibilities, which seem either compulsory, necessary, or intelligent to us, will begin to appear more and more irrational to others. The bizarre diagnoses occur because, in some cases, if a ‘cause disease’ (excuse from blame) does not exist, it has to be 'discovered’ (invented). Psychiatry has expanded its diagnoses of mental disease every year to include 'illnesses’ like kleptomania and frotteurism [now frotteuristic disorder in the DSM-V]. (Do you know what frotteurism is? It is a mental disorder that causes people, usually men, to surreptitiously fondle women’s breasts or genitals in crowded situations such as elevators and subways.) The problem with the escalation of these kinds of diagnoses is that either we can become so adapted to our thinking and feelings instead of our environment that we will become dissociated from the whole idea that we have a problem at all; or at least, the more we become blameless, the more we become helpless in the face of our problems, thinking our problems need to be 'fixed’ by outside help before we can move forward on our own. For 2,000 years of Western culture our problems existed in the human power struggle constantly being waged between our principles and our primal impulses. In the last fifty years we have unprincipled ourselves and become what I call 'psychologized.’ Now the power struggle is between the 'expert’ and the 'disorder.’ Since the rise of psychiatry and psychology as the moral compass, we don’t talk about moral imperatives anymore, we talk about coping mechanisms. We are not living our lives by principles so much as we are living our lives by mental health diagnoses. This is not working because it very subtly undermines our solid sense of self.

Contrary to “the mantra,” White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn’t have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who’ve somehow contracted it. I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it’s just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don’t notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant. The affliction I’m speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic’s career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it’s more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people’s foibles and failures at a moment’s notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people’s literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That’s how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal mots justes. You’d better be right there with that verdict or you’d better just shut the fuck up. But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I’ve written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it’s like I’m shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I’m capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it’s the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering. And here’s another confession while I’m at it—wow, it feels good to finally come clean about it all. It’s that … once in a while, when I’m feeling especially jellylike, I’ve found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of other people’s moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I’m supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It’s not like I’d crib anyone’s actual sentences (though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that’s how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it’s the tranquillity of their moral authority I’m hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about New Republic editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I’m in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.

The creation groans from all the pain and sorrow that surrounds us. We have a strong sense that life is not the way it’s supposed to be.[4] We cry out at injustices, rail against inequalities, long for things to get fixed. The long march for racial, gender, and economic equality is an ongoing struggle. Progress is rare. When it comes to electronics, the advances seem to arrive on a regular basis. Every holiday season, we’re greeted by upgrades, by a new network from 3G to 4G to 5G. Products make progress seem easy and inevitable. The hard work of design and engineering is hidden. Yet, even the latest, greatest technology breaks down. Unfortunately, we don’t know how to fix our gadgets. The mechanics that drive our devices often defy our comprehension. We toss out our old computers and cell phones, and we embrace the new and improved. Replacing isn’t the same as redeeming.

Post-Rehab Advice: 5 Things to Do After Getting Out of Rehab Getting yourself into rehab is not the easiest thing to do, but it is certainly one of the most important things you can ever do for your well-being. However, your journey to self-healing does not simply end on your last day at rehab. Now that you have committed your self to sobriety and wellness, the next step is maintaining the new life you have built. To make sure that you are on the right track, here are some tips on what you should do as soon as you get back home from treatment. 1. Have a Game Plan Most people are encouraged to leave rehab with a proper recovery plan. What’s next for you? Envision how you want yourself to be after the inpatient treatment. This is a crucial part of the entire recovery process since it will be easier to determine the next phase of treatment you need. 2. Build Your New Social Life Finishing rehab opens endless opportunities for you. Use it to put yourself out in the world and maybe even pursue a new passion in life. Keep in mind that there are a lot of alcohol- and drug-free activities that offer a social and mental outlet. Meet new friends by playing sports, taking a class or volunteering. It is also a good opportunity for you to have sober friends who can help you through your recovery. 3. Keep Yourself Busy One of the struggles after rehab is finding purpose. Your life in recovery will obviously center on trying to stay sober. To remain sober in the long term, you must have a life that’s worth living. What drives you? Begin finding your purpose by trying out things that make you productive and satisfied at the same time. Get a new job, do volunteer work or go back to school. Try whatever is interesting for you. 4. Pay It Forward As a person who has gone through rehab, you are in the perfect place to help those who are in the early stages of recovery. Join a support group and do not be afraid to tell your story. Reaching out to other recovering individuals will also help keep your mind off your own struggles, while being an inspiration to others. 5. Get Help If You’re Still Struggling Research proves that about half of those in recovery will relapse, usually within the treatment’s first few months. However, these numbers do not necessarily mean that rehab is a waste of time. Similar to those with physical disabilities who need continuous therapy, individuals recovering from addiction also require ongoing support to stay clean and sober. Are you slipping back to your old ways? Do not let pride or shame take control of your mind. Life throws you a curveball sometimes, and slipping back to old patterns does not mean you are hopeless. Be sure to have a sober friend, family, therapist or sponsor you could trust and call in case you are struggling. Remember that building a drug- and alcohol-free life is no walk in the park, but you will likely get through it with the help of those who are dear to you.

In the Bible, the term “apocalyptic” (apokalypsis) encompasses a worldview in which the truly significant battle is the ongoing one between the Lord God of Sabaoth2 (Hebrew, meaning armies) and the Enemy, who deploys the principalities and Powers (Eph. 2: 2). This contest on the heavenly level is enacted on the earthly level by struggles large and small in the realm of human affairs —battles waged not with worldly weapons but with the spiritual armor of God (Eph. 6: 11-17). 3

the failure of the established order of industrial society, and of the political classes who manage it, is becoming hard to ignore. Consider the way that the world’s leaders have reacted to the ongoing implosion of the global economy, or nearly any other recent crisis you care to name: in each case, it’s a broken-record sequence of understating the problem, trying to manage appearances, getting caught flatfooted by events, and struggling to load the blame for yet another round of failures onto anybody within reach. Rinse and repeat a few times, and even the most diehard supporters of the status quo start wishing that somebody, somewhere, would stand up and demonstrate some actual leadership.

ongoing failure in sanctification … is the direct result of failing to remember God’s love for us in the gospel.… If we fail to remember our justification, redemption, and reconciliation, we’ll struggle in our sanctification.

When scientific proposals are brought forward, they are not judged by hunches or gut feelings. Only one standard is relevant: a proposal's ability to explain or predict experimental data and astronomical observations. Therein lies the singular beauty of science. As we struggle toward deeper understanding, we must give our creative imagination ample room to explore. We must be willing to step outside conventional ideas and established frameworks. But unlike the wealth of other human activities through which the creative impulse is channeled, science supplies a final reckoning, a built-in assessment of what's right and what's not. A complication of scientific life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that some of our theoretical ideas have soared past our ability to test or observe. String theory has for some time been the poster child for this situation; the possibility that we're part of a multiverse provides an even more sprawling example. I've laid out a general prescription for how a multiverse proposal might be testable, but at our current level of understanding none of the multiverse theories we've encountered yet meet the criteria. With ongoing research, this situation could greatly improve.

In Frodo we are meant to see ourselves: our weaknesses, our rationalizations, and our lack of resolve in combatting evil. But we also get a glimpse into a life of courage and perseverance in the ongoing struggle: you resisted to the last. Tolkien’s story reminds us that evil is a sleepless force in human lives, and that the war against it demands constant vigilance. After

Where belief tries to expel doubt, faith walks with it, offering no easy answers. Belief insists, while faith hopes and trusts. The one is demanded, the other freely given, and this freedom means that real faith is both difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand-in-hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it. And sometimes even in conscious defiance of it.

…Genuine holiness…makes us more progressively aware of and disturbed by our ongoing struggles with indwelling sin. We grow more aware of our own need for Christ, not our own growth in virtue.

First, you must repent immediately. We talked about our need for repentance in the first chapter. Repentance isn’t something that only takes place in tranquil moments of calm reflection or intense times of powerful resolve. Repentance is an ongoing practice, and it happens most commonly in the fog of temptation. Repentance is something you will do repeatedly in your long-term struggle against porn. In that initial moment of temptation, you must begin asking the Lord to forgive you for your lustful desires. You must ask him for grace to flee this temptation.

One alternative that nearly always relieves our suffering is surrender: we surrender our false self, and our attachment to the notion that we can control anything. We suffer when we resist what is. We slowly find that one of the most powerful and healing acts is giving up our need to always be in control. This freedom is that of our True Self. In this context, the word “surrender” does not mean to “give up” or to “lie down” in the military sense of losing a war. Rather, we mean that one who surrenders wins the struggle of trying to control, and ameliorates most of their resultant needless suffering (Whitfield 1985). This becomes an ongoing process in life, not a goal to be achieved only once.

Convincing the domovoi demon of the necessity of wearing the hairnet is an ongoing struggle. The ancient hearth demon just doesn’t grasp modern hygiene.

We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning. These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.

What must stop are the ongoing (and often useless) discussions we continue to have with our adult children, who clearly know how to push our buttons, how to control us and thus control the outcome, be it consciously or subconsciously.

Showing love and concern as a caring teacher Teaching how to live into the fullness of his message Testifying to sacred realities invisible on the surface Pointing to what one needs to learn and trust Forgiving those who stumble and fall off of the path Encouraging the effort to go an extra mile for others Explaining what human minds find difficult to perceive Leading into the depths of being where the true self resides Extending compassion for sorrows, defeats, and struggles Attending a desire to be a truly loving individual Understanding how challenging it is to absorb his teachings Cautioning to stay alert and appreciate life to the utmost Influencing the decision to be generous and self-giving Finding the lost when they wander far from the Way Inviting to accept with faith what is not fully perceived Midwifing the ongoing process of transformation

We then move onto the possibilities offered by mindfulness in changing the content of your ongoing conversation with yourself. Chatter, chatter, chatter. We’re all up to it. But are there recurring themes in this constant stream of self-talk that don’t serve you well? For example, are you a worrier, constantly anticipating all the things that could possibly go wrong then convincing yourself that the worst outcome is almost certain? Or are you a victim, feeling you can never make any headway because of your circumstances, past events, or the people in your life? Or are you someone who struggles to find any compelling purpose or happiness beyond filling your days with as many pleasurable distractions as possible?

Apocalypticism refers to the belief that God has revealed the imminent end of the ongoing struggle between good and evil in history. Apocalypse is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation about the future or the heavenly realm is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality. The Greek word apokalypsis means “uncovering” or “revelation.

Lost Cause ideology and the mythology of the Solid South were cudgels employed to demand political conformity among whites to stifle dissent from ruling-class agendas as well as to suppress blacks. In his definitive study of disenfranchisement, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910, J. Morgan Kousser quotes North Carolina Governor Charles B. Aycock, who made the point succinctly, writing several years after a violent 1898 Democratic putsch ousted the interracial Populist-Republican-Fusion government that had won consecutive statewide elections: "The Democratic party is alone sufficient. We need a united people. We need the combined effort of every North Carolinian. We need the strength which comes from believing alike." Segregation was enforced on whites as well as blacks. That reality is obscured in a contemporary perspective that flattens out history and context into a simple polarity of racism/anti-racism and reduces politics to an unchanging contest of black and white. That perspective compresses historical distinctions between slavery and Jim Crow and ignores the generation of struggle, often enough biracial or interracial, against ruling class power over defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South, as well as ongoing struggle against and within the new order as it consolidated.

Caregivers who anticipate ongoing contact after placement may be better able to relinquish their role than caregivers who anticipate that "good-bye" will be forever." ... "Former caregivers may experience grief and guilt because they are incapable of providing permanent adequate care, or they may feel anger and resentment if they had wanted but were not allowed to continue parenting the child. Even the birth parent(s) who voluntarily terminates guardianship may experience considerable ambivalence by the time of placement. Birth or foster parents who are struggling with their own needs may have difficulty meeting [the childs'] needs during the transition period and at the time of placement. In cases such as these, it is important to have sensitive professionals available to help the former caregivers identify and express their feelings about the separation and support the toddler's transition.

Yet we’re so weary of living with the ongoing crisis that we return to the same behaviors and habits—and our adult children have us pegged.

Galeano emphasized the import of nature in the European “conquest/invasion” of Latin America and the subsequent and ongoing colonial project. And he “located” the divorce of nature and people’s communion within—and as fundamental to—the venture of Western civilization.1 The growing recognition, particularly in the “Souths” of the world today, that Western civilization is in crisis, and the propositions coming from Abya-Yala (the name, originally from the Cuna language, that indigenous peoples collectively give to the Americas today) for radically distinct life-models and visions interlaced with and in nature, give Galeano’s words pragmatic substance. Galeano’s words also, in a sense, establish the importance of location and place; that is to say, of the place and location from which we think the world, and act, struggle, and live in and with it.

Our work is an ongoing struggle with unintended consequences. We must try to narrow the gap, which is sometimes a gulf, between what we intend and the results we achieve.

At least three aspects of apophatic mysticism can be found in Palmer’s autobiographic records. These are: the struggle to accept internal “darkness” and “nothingness” in order to enter the way of holiness or oneness with God; the ongoing experience of “passive” surrender to God leading to progressively advanced spiritual development, and dark nights of the soul as a purgative initiation into deeper levels of union with God. As we shall see, Palmer’s apophatic mysticism was at the core of the pivotal events in her spiritual journey, becoming the fountainhead for her most significant contributions to Wesleyan theology.

the United States has managed its cultural diversity through a collective determination among its people to be at once pluralistic and civil. As difficult as pluralism and civility are for both red and blue today, that is the way for America to be truest to itself. If secular and religious Americans can respect one another, avoid believing each other to be dangerous, and avoid being dangerous to each other—engage in what philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff calls dialogical pluralism—America also can set an example that is germane to the Middle East’s ongoing struggle.

In this paper I propose the existence of two distinct presentations of DID, a Stable and an Active one. While people with Stable DID struggle with their traumatic past, with triggers that re-evoke that past and with the problems of daily functioning with severe dissociation, people with Active DID are, in addition, also engaged in a life of current, on-going involvement in abusive relationships, and do not respond to treatment in the same way as other DID patients. The paper observes these two proposed DID presentations in the context of other trauma-based disorders, through the lens of their attachment relationship. It proposes that the type, intensity and frequency of relational trauma shape—and can thus predict—the resulting mental disorder. - Through the lens of attachment relationship: Stable DID, Active DID and other trauma-based mental disorders

..the good life warrants an ongoing struggle to be clear about what’s important, and to seek it with lucidity and passion; not to be distracted by false ambitions, or waylaid by dissipated conscious

This kind of mental engagement communicates the struggle between experiencing projective identifications, on the one hand, and the ability to survive and have his own thoughts, a mind of his own, on the other. If stated in terms of the ongoing internal dialogue between ‘proper object’ and ‘dream object’, passion is the emotional link signalling these two representations of the therapist’s experience in dialogue. It is an internal dialogue that takes place, or is conveyed, within an intersubjective process (Billow, 2000). The

As we have seen, because an infinite game cannot be brought to an end, it cannot be repeated. Unrepeatability is a characteristic of culture everywhere. Mozart's Jupiter Symphony cannot be composed again, nor could Rembrandt's self-portraits be painted twice. Society preserves these works as the prizes of those who have triumphed in their respective games. Culture, however, does not consider the works as the outcome of a struggle, but as moments in an ongoing struggle-the very struggle that culture is. Culture continues what Mozart and Rembrandt had themselves continued by way of their work: an original, or deviant, shaping of the tradition they received, original enough that it does not invite duplication of itself by others, but invites the originality of others in response.

The human destiny is to participate in the ongoing work of Christ in an evolving universe, sharing in the building of community, peace, hospitality and understanding in a violent and divided world. Jesus was a human, like us, whose faithfulness to this servant way emerged from struggle and tough choices. But he served the purposes of God with such consistency and grace that it’s appropriate to describe him as unique. His sensitivity to divine possibility and his courage in living into those directions is an example that inspires us, yet remains beyond the reach of our best efforts. In this sense there is a great gulf between Jesus and us, yet we are on the same road, co-creators in an evolving universe and growing in sensitivity to the presence and call of Christ.

Jesus, we cry out for freedom today—freedom in our ongoing struggles with shame, both the shame we feel and the shame we give. Though our guilt has been completely taken care of by your work on the cross, Jesus, we still feel varying degrees of shame, and we act out in a variety of destructive ways. We vacillate between self-contempt and other-centered contempt, and both of these contradict and sabotage the very love by which, and for which, we were saved. Indeed, we need the freedom you alone can provide, Jesus.

The first outcome of these conversations [in Maine] was our recognition that the ongoing rebellions were not a revolution, as they were being called by many in the black community and by radicals and liberals. Nor were they only a breakdown in law and order or a riot, as they were labeled in the mainstream media. A rebellion, we decided, is an important stage in the development of revolution because it represents the massive uprising and protest of the oppressed. Therefore it not only begets reforms but also throws into question the legitimacy and supposed permanence of existing institutions. However, a rebellion usually lasts only a few days. After it ends, the rebels are elated. But they then begin to view themselves mainly as victims and expect those in power to assume responsibility for changing the system. By contrast, a revolution requires that a people go beyond struggling against oppressive institutions and beyond victim thinking. A revolution involves making an evolutionary/revolutionary leap towards becoming more socially responsible and more self-critical human beings. In order to transform the world, we must transform ourselves.

Spiritual Growth Grow in grace and understanding of our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ. Glory to the Master, now and forever! Yes! 2 Peter 3:18 MSG Are you continuing to grow in your love and knowledge of the Lord, or are you “satisfied” with the current state of your spiritual health? Your relationship with God is ongoing; it unfolds day by day, and it offers countless opportunities to grow closer to Him … or not. As each new day unfolds, you are confronted with a wide range of decisions: how you will behave, where you will direct your thoughts, with whom you will associate, and what you will choose to worship. These choices, along with many others like them, are yours and yours alone. How you choose determines how your relationship with God will unfold. Hopefully, you’re determined to make yourself a growing Christian. Your Savior deserves no less, and neither, by the way, do you. Growing up in Christ is surely the most difficult, courageous, exhilarating, and eternally important work any of us will ever do. Susan Lenzkes You are either becoming more like Christ every day or you’re becoming less like Him. There is no neutral position in the Lord. Stormie Omartian There is nothing more important than understanding God’s truth and being changed by it, so why are we so casual about accepting the popular theology of the moment without checking it out for ourselves? God has given us a mind so that we can learn and grow. As His people, we have a great responsibility and wonderful privilege of growing in our understanding of Him. Sheila Walsh If all struggles and sufferings were eliminated, the spirit would no more reach maturity than would the child. Elisabeth Elliot Maturity in Christ is about consistent pursuit in spite of the attacks and setbacks. It is about remaining in the arms of God. Abiding and staying, even in my weakness, even in my failure. Angela Thomas Suffering is never for nothing. It is that you and I might be conformed to the image of Christ. Elisabeth Elliot We set our eyes on the finish line, forgetting the past, and straining toward the mark of spiritual maturity and fruitfulness.

The years 1928-1933 were a time of crisis and unemployment all over Europe an the struggle to survive - be housed, fed and clothed - was real. I did not actually understand, at the time, everything that went on around me, but struggling hard against financial difficulties and being Jewish, too, made for an on-going hard life.

That’s what artists and athletes do day in and day out. Whether you see them at work or not the process is ongoing. They are working to achieve their heart’s desire to either enlighten or entertain anyone who cares to watch or listen. Some of them achieve glory but others just do it because they love to and they are driven to. When something, anything, interferes with that desire, their sense of self is jeopardized and they have to struggle to hang on to their identity. That’s the real cost involved in producing a painting, writing a novel, or hitting over .300 for the season.

Born in the year Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868, and dying during the March on Washington in 1963, DuBois, more than any other black leader, personified the ongoing African American struggle for freedom and equality.