Wesleyan Quotes

I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies

Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.

Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

I feel the nights stretching away thousands long behind the days till they reach the darkness where all of me is ancestor.

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.

Do not make me into that man of hatred for whom I feel only hatred.

I want to be bruised by God. I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed. I want to be entered and picked clean.

He is being nibbled to death by ducks. --More Later, Less the Same

Blessed are those who break off from separateness theirs is wild heaven.

And if all I know how to do is speak, it is for you that I shall speak. My lips shall speak for miseries that have no mouth, my voice shall be the liberty of those who languish in the dungeon of despair… And above all my body as well as my soul, beware of folding your arms in the sterile attitude of spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of pain is not a proscenium.

i only want the world to end when i'm done with it

They didn't have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into a chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear: 'You look like a god sitting there. Why don't you try writing something?

we can speculate on the relay of our common activity, make a circle round our errant roots. Dancing is what we make of falling. Music is what we make of music's absence, the real presence making music underneath. I'm exhausted so my soul is rested.

When a clock dies no one wakes.

Although upon doctrines of grace our views differ from those avowed by Arminian Methodists, we have usually found that on the great evangelical truths we are in full agreement, and we have been comforted by the belief that Wesleyans were solid upon the central doctrines.

Putting my hands on. What April couldn't fix Wasn't worth the time: Egg shell & dried placenta Light as memory. Patches of fur, feathers, & bits of skin. A nest Of small deaths among anemone. A canopy edged over, shadowplaying The struggle underneath As if it never happened

About the same time I came in contact with another Christian family. At their suggestion I attended the Wesleyan church every Sunday. For these days I also had their standing invitation to dinner. The church did not make a favourable impression on me. The sermons seemed to be uninspiring. The congregation did not strike me as being particularly religious. They were not an assembly of devout souls; they appeared rather to be wordly-minded people, going to church for recreation and in conformity to custom. Here, at times, I would involuntarily doze. I was ashamed, but some of my neighbours, who were in no better case, lightened the shame. I could not go on long like this, and soon gave up attending the service.

With the stone question In the heads of Greek statues Who ask where their arms And legs and the tips of their noses Have gone.

You used to be alive, now you’re almost mythic.

Wesleyanism was at its most influential when it was a people movement that was reproducing like mad. It

That’s their philosophy,” said Greder, whose day job was associate dean of students at Illinois Wesleyan. “Dance with the ones who brought you.

Inside my skin, loving you, I am this space my body believes in. — Yuself Komunyakaa, from “Unnatural State of the Unicorn,” Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. (Wesleyan University Press 1993)

known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: “Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason.

I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book] trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)

I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book], trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope. So I look at the stars in this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense.

be they lawyers soldiers princesses prostitutes actors activists or acrobats on five continents in dozens of countries in the world the women are lying down for the men the men of many museums (in ‘At the musée de l’homme’)

Our lives are eschatologically stretched between the sneak preview of the new world being born among us in the church, and the old world where the principalities and powers are reluctant to give way. In the meantime, which is the only time the church has ever known, we live as those who know something about the fate of the world that the world does not yet know. And that makes us different. —Will Willimon, Conversion in the Wesleyan Tradition

Don’t sign your name between worlds, surmount the manifold of meanings, trust the tearstain, learn to live. ― Paul Celan, “Don’t sign your name,” Glottal Stop. Translated by Heather McHugh & Nikolai Popov. (Wesleyan; 1st edition September 30, 2000)

The men she met all seemed to say they were “several years out of Wesleyan.” Their beds were never made, or else made poorly, when she climbed into them. No one yet had the time or inclination to take care of themselves, and it was unclear when that would ever begin.

The year after that novel was published, I was invited to teach at Wesleyan. I congratulated myself on a completed plan on that first day of classes. I know some people condescend to me when I mention that I was once a waiter, but I will never regret it. Waiting tables was not just a good living, but also a good education in people. I saw things I never would have imagined, an education in life out past the limits of my own social class. Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

I ponder these questions by taking seriously this ancient, ambiguous, and diverse Bible we have as well as honoring my humanity—my experiences, my reasoning, when and where I was born—and I try to get all these factors to talk to each other. That may ring a bell with some of you. I am echoing the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral. We are always processing God and faith not from a high place, but from the vantage point of our inescapable humanity—our reason, experience, tradition, and scripture. (The Episcopal Three-Legged Stool is similar, but it combines reason and experience.)

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to the Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there can be no self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and if there is no hell and therefore no chance of our getting into trouble by forgetting the obligation, then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity inside the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes mere ingratitude to the Savior. On the other hand, if Christ did not pay our score, it still stands against us; and such debts make us extremely uncomfortable. The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in the scale as to be capable of them. The 'saved' thief experiences an ecstatic happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he is tempted to steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But if the atheist steals he has no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that he is a thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to sooth his shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent act of benevolence; but that does not alter the fact that he did steal; and his conscience will not be easy until he has conquered his will to steal and changed himself into an honest man... Now though the state of the believers in the atonement may thus be the happier, it is most certainly not more desirable from the point of view of the community. The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our hope lies now. Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to believe in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we evidently have a right to do. Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.'

I read at Wesleyan last week— “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After the reading, I went to one of their classes to answer questions. There were several young teachers in there and one began by saying, “Miss O’Connor, why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked quite disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” says I. He really looked hurt at that. Finally he said, “Well Miss O’Connor, what IS the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” "To cover his head," I said. He looked crushed then and left me alone." - Flannery O'Connor to Caroline Gordon

In the updraft, the particulate glitz is beside itself.

We can also recite the failures of institutions and systems that are near and dear to us. The good news is that the past can be forgiven.

Today could be described as a retired man humming tunelessly to himself.

While in the water bird’s throat, the white, visible pulse of a fish. Between being and becoming, turning wildly as it falls.

but all I see in the space between the words, / between drops of rain / is how we are both sad / in any language

I believe in the violence of not knowing.

i’d lash myself to any new mast

you have to wonder how a boy or the shape of a boy wound up here in this unstable field.

i know everyone i love who’s dead didn’t actually become the poem i wrote about them.

A Blessing on the Poets Patient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker, Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover, Sharer and saver, muser and acher, You who are open to hide or uncover, Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker; May language’s language, the silence that lies Under each word, move you over and over, Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.

We have said that the duende likes the edge of things, the wound, and that it is drawn to where forms fuse themselves in a longing greater than their visible expressions. — Federico García Lorca, from “Theory and Function of the Duende,” trans. J. L. Gilli, 1933, Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950, ed. Melissa Kwasny (Wesleyan University Press, 2004)

In this sense, then, sanctification is primarily the process of redemption. It is process precisely because it is moral and personal and not simply legal. But in the process lie crisis points without which moral degenerates into a nonmoral naturalism.

At present, under the burden of canons and the burden of language’s deep complicity with countless atrocities, the very making of poems requires audacity. And if the audacity is well-intended, it requires a certain awkwardness as proof of its unrehearsed refusal to comply with silence.

Three in Translation]" for WCW I wish I understood the beauty in leaves falling. To whom are we beautiful as we go? I lie in the field still, absorbing the stars and silently throwing off their presence. Silently I breathe and die by turns. He was ripe and fell to the ground from a bough out where the wind is free of the branches

At the end of the small hours: life flat on its face, miscarried dreams and nowhere to put them, the river of life listless in its hopeless bed, not rising or falling, unsure of its flow, lamentably empty, the heavy impartial shadow of boredom creeping over the quality of all things, the air stagnant, unbroken by the brightness of a single bird.

It reminded me of how I’d felt applying to college. Night after night, I sat with my father in his study while he read aloud from Baron’s. He’d read the name of the college, the number of men and the number of women, and a description in guidebook prose; then he’d say, ‘How does that sound?’ and I’d think, Sounds just like the last one. It took me a few nights to realize that my father was reading only the colleges that I had some chance of getting into – not Brown but Bowling Green; not Wesleyan but Ohio Wesleyan; not Williams or Smith, but William Smith. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn’t realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University, explains, “Racism is a structure, not an event.”13 American women’s struggle for suffrage illustrates how institutional power transforms prejudice and discrimination into structures of oppression. Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals. While women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights. Men could do so because they controlled all the institutions. Therefore, the only way women could gain suffrage was for men to grant it to them; women could not grant suffrage to themselves.

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or “extrapolate?” What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words? Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue. What if “of” were such a hot button? “Scumble of bushes.” What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another’s name?

We believe evangelism is more relational than confrontational, more communal than solitary, and is more a beginning point than an end. Evangelism involves not only sharing our faith with others, but also welcoming them into a community and enabling them to begin to grow in their faith. Above all evangelism is about love: God’s love for us in Jesus, our love for our neighbor, and the invitation to receive and grow in a new life that is characterized by love.

For too long has everything divine been utilized, And all the heavenly powers, the kindly ones, thrown away, Consumed for kicks by thankless, Cunning men, who, when the exalted One works in their fields, think they Know the daylight and the Thunderer, And their telescope might see them all and Count and name all the stars in heaven; But the Father covers our eyes with holy Night so we might remain. He loves no wildness! Our expanding power will never force heaven.

By June the revival began to wane. But Roberts’s vision had been realized. An estimated 100,000 confessed Christ. The Congregationalists added 26,500 members. Another 24,000 Welsh joined the Calvinist Methodist Church. About 4,000 opted for the Wesleyan Church. The remainder were split between the Anglicans and several Baptist groups.13 The effect on Welsh society was undeniable. Output from the coal mines famously slowed because the horses wouldn’t move. Miners converted in the revival no longer kicked or swore at the horses, so the horses didn’t know what to do.14 Judges closed their courtrooms with nothing to judge. Christians wielded the revival as apologetic against the growing number of skeptics who derided religion. Stead argued: The most thoroughgoing materialist who resolutely and forever rejects as inconceivable the existence of the soul in man, and to whom “the universe is but the infinite empty eye-socket of a dead God,” could not fail to be impressed by the pathetic sincerity of these men; nor, if he were just, could he refuse to recognize that out of their faith in the creed which he has rejected they have drawn, and are drawing, a motive power that makes for righteousness, and not only for righteousness, but for the joy of living, that he would be powerless to give them.15

TO DRINK I want to gather your darkness in my hands, to cup it like water and drink. I want this in the same way as I want to touch your cheek— it is the same— the way a moth will come to the bedroom window in late September, beating and beating its wings against cold glass; the way a horse will lower his long head to water, and drink, and pause to lift his head and look, and drink again, taking everything in with the water, everything. IN YOUR HANDS I begin to grow extravagant, like kudzu, that rank, green weed devouring house after house in the South— towards midday, the roof tiles start to throw a wavering light back towards the sun, and roads begin to soften, darken, taking your peregrine tongue, your legs, your eyes, home to shuttered windows, to the cool rooms

J’habite une blessure sacrée j’habite des ancêtres imaginaires j’habite un vouloir obscur j’habite un long silence j’habite une soif irrémédiable j’habite un voyage de mille ans j’habite une guerre de trois cent ans j’habite un culte désaffecté entre bulbe et caïeu j’habite l’espace inexploité j’habite du basalte non une coulée mais de la lave le mascaret qui remonte la valleuse à toute allure et brûle toutes les mosquées je m’accommode de mon mieux de cet avatar d’une version du paradis absurdement ratée -c’est bien pire qu’un enfer- j’habite de temps en temps une de mes plaies chaque minute je change d’appartement et toute paix m’effraie tourbillon de feu ascidie comme nulle autre pour poussières de mondes égarés ayant crachés volcan mes entrailles d’eau vive je reste avec mes pains de mots et mes minerais secrets j’habite donc une vaste pensée mais le plus souvent je préfère me confiner dans la plus petite de mes idées

The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers’ shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the green-grocers’! the awful hats in the milliners’! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements, “A Woman’s Love!”, and the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school buildings, expensive pink brick, and graveled playground inside iron railings, all very imposing, and mixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison. Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-do-la exercises and beginning a “sweet children’s song.” Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing... What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will power remained?

There are Lutherans and Wesleyans in the present day, but there are no Whitefieldites. No! The great evangelist of last century was a simple, guileless man, who lived for one thing only, and that was to preach Christ.

Despite all this schism, Wesleyan Methodism continued to grow by leaps and bounds throughout the nineteenth century, bringing Arminian views to the mainstream of American evangelicalism.

As will become clear in subsequent chapters, what Palmer is really describing with the limited conceptual framework available to her, is what the contemplative Catholic tradition identifies as a threefold process of negation, purgation, and illumination. The seeming ambiguity of Palmer’s shorter way is in fact a distinctly Wesleyan form of via negativa spirituality.

It cannot be overstated that in Palmer’s experiential, Wesleyan mysticism, despite having had numerous dreams, visions, episodes of spiritual warfare and moments of mystical union, the plain words of the Bible were evidence enough for Palmer’s faith. Though mystical experiences carried much authority in her life, they did so inasmuch as they served to further her love for God and her obedience to God’s word, the Bible. She did not demand or even recommend mystical experiences as being necessary for growth in holiness. A holy Christian is a Bible Christian, declared Palmer again and again.

The first important act of self-denial for 21st-century followers of Jesus may be to say no to being too busy to be a disciple.

Giving God, “I am no longer my own, but thine. Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee, exalted for thee or brought low by thee. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing.”* Amen. *Excerpt from “A Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition

Jesus touched lepers and others who were “unclean” and in touching them infected them with the love of God.

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.

Individual emotional responses vary widely from person to person in all religious groups, and psychological reactions to life are not essentially determined by one’s theology. But nevertheless, what one believes about himself as a human being and about God’s grace has a bearing on the kind of Christian life one expects and hence experiences. The presence of the Holy Spirit may, and often does, surprise the Christian by a way of life totally unexpected. But one’s theological “complex” may raise a barrier to that surprise that is sometimes difficult to overcome because faith for it is paralyzed by prejudice. If one believes that he must be victimized by sin, his conscience may not rise up to condemn him and his longing for holiness will die.

I stared at a tree against dusk Till it was a girl Standing beside a country road Shucking cane with her teeth. She looked up & smiled & waved. Lost in what hurts, In what tasted good, could she Ever learn there's no love In sugar?

For Trisha The truth's in myth not fact, a story fragment or an act that lasts and stands for all: how bees made honey in a skull.

Wesley insisted on preaching the law to Christians because the law is God’s means of crafting a holy people. But Wesley knew the perils of the law as well as any Lutheran ever did. He was well aware that the preaching of the law brings with it certain dangers: legalism, condemnation, and pharisaic judgmentalism. So he placed his preaching of the law in the context of free grace. Grace first, then law. The result of this combination, in this order, is the dynamo that drives Wesleyan spirituality.

The complete NIV Bible was first published in 1978. It was a completely new translation made by over a hundred scholars working directly from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts. The translators came from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, giving the translation an international scope. They were from many denominations and churches—including Anglican, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Brethren, Christian Reformed, Church of Christ, Evangelical Covenant, Evangelical Free, Lutheran, Mennonite, Methodist, Nazarene, Presbyterian, Wesleyan and others. This breadth of denominational and theological perspective helped to safeguard the translation from sectarian bias. For these reasons, and by the grace of God, the NIV has gained a wide readership in all parts of the English-speaking world. The work of translating the Bible is never finished. As good as they are, English translations must be regularly updated so that they will continue to communicate accurately the meaning of God’s Word. Updates are needed in order to reflect the latest developments in our understanding of the biblical world and its languages and to keep pace with changes in English usage. Recognizing, then, that the NIV would retain its ability to communicate God’s Word accurately only if it were regularly updated, the original translators established The Committee on Bible Translation (CBT). The committee is a self-perpetuating group of biblical scholars charged with keeping abreast of advances in biblical scholarship and changes in English and issuing periodic updates to the NIV. CBT is an independent, self-governing body and has sole responsibility for the NIV text. The committee mirrors the original group of translators in its diverse international and denominational makeup and in its unifying commitment to the Bible as God’s inspired Word.

Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when Mattel brought out its "Shani" line—three Barbie-sized African-American dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions— there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable. "For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized our business." Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children." Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful.

Yes! believers everywhere are stones in the spiritual house, broken perhaps into conformity, or chiselled into beauty by successive strokes of trial; and wherever they are, in the hut or in the ancestral hall, in the climates of the snow or of the sun, whether society hoot them or honour them, whether they wrap themselves in delicate apparelling, or, in rugged homespun, toil all day for bread, they are parts of the true temple which God esteems higher than cloistered crypt or stately fane, and the top stone of which shall hereafter be brought on with joy.

The issues we address do not pit the Wesleyan against the Calvinist or the evangelical against the charismatic. This is not to say that these are not important issues, because they are and will remain so until the Lord comes back. But they are not issues that we are going to allow Satan to use as a point of division.

particularly through the Methodist movement led by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. Their theology and their understanding of the gospels are quite different topics upon which I am not qualified to speak. But I suspect that the Wesleyan emphasis on Christian experience, both the “spiritual” experience of knowing the love of God in one’s own heart and life and the “practical” experience of living a holy life for oneself and of working for God’s justice in the world, might well be cited as evidence of a movement in which parts of the church did actually integrate several elements in the gospels, a synthesis that the majority of Western Christians have allowed to fall apart.

In old census reports, I found a hint of how British administrators had vivisected Sri Lanka in the early 20th century. In 1901…the census classified people into seven categories—Europeans; Burghers, Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, referring to Muslims of south Indian origin; Malays; and the indigenous Veddahs of eastern and south-eastern Sri Lanka. “A mere 10 years later, the matrix had exploded. By ethnicity, a Sri Lankan in 1911 could identify himself in any one of 10 ways, and then again in any one of 11 ways by religious denomination—a multiplicative tumult of identity. Slender distinctions were now officially recognized. A Sinhalese could be a low-country Sinhalese or a Kandyan Sinhalese; a Tamil could be a Ceylon Tamil or an Indian Tamil, depending on how recently his family had settled in Sri Lanka; a Christian could be a Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, or a Salvationist, or he could belong to the Church of England or ‘Other Sects.’ Assembling legislatures based on such muddled ethnic loyalties helped the British by disrupting solidarity and nationalism because, as Governor William Manning once wrote to his secretary of state in London, ‘no single community can impose its will upon the other communities.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University, explains, “Racism is a structure, not an event.”13

Spiritualism, born out of the same discontent with social restrictions and punitive theologies as the suffrage movement, ended up even sharing the same table. The subsequent meeting, at the Seneca Falls Universalist Wesleyan Church on July 19-20 would ignite the woman's suffrage movement, setting the stage for a seventy-two year battle that resulted in the 1920 passage of the Twenty-First Amendment.

But it does mean that if you are, say, a Lutheran, you must not cut yourself off from what is right and good in the Wesleyan, Reformed, charismatic, Anabaptist, and other lines. (And of course, I could have rephrased that sentence in any combination.)

In the 1960s and 1970s, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan named Hubert O’Gorman found that those who advocated for segregation were the most likely to believe that those around them also supported segregation. On the other hand, those advocating change from the status quo were much more likely to think that they were alone, even though they were not. “The closer whites came to endorsing the value of strict racial segregation,” O’Gorman observed, “the more apt they were to assume that the majority of whites in their areas agreed with them.”53 By misreading others and keeping quiet about their true views, people thus damaged their own integrity and the greater cause they privately hoped would advance.54

Say something about real love. Yes, true love—more than parted lips, than parted legs in sorrow’s darkroom of potash & blues. Let the brain stumble from its hidingplace, from its cell block, to the edge of oblivion to come to itself, sharp-tongued as a boar’s grin in summer moss —Yusef Komunyakaa, from “Safe Subjects,”Neon Venacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)

Clark, forty-five, was a Wesleyan graduate (possibly the only graduate from the famously liberal school to work for Trump or even vote for him) and a close associate of Bill Stepien’s. He had become a kind of self-appointed sheriff, trying to keep the grifters, kooks, and obvious self-dealers out of Trumptown—and away from the campaign’s money.

C’est un tableau pendu dans un sombre musée Et quelquefois tu vas le regarder de près

But mostly we are made of a heavier stuff, the slow descent of breast, foot-arches flattening towards earth, the hundred ways the body longs for home.

TOWARD THE SOLSTICE 9 A.M., already the day is gathering into heat, and the hills today are a little less green than they were, like the flowers closing now into one concentrated whorl, their color pulled to a tightening heart. I woke this morning thinking of your lips, how they lie flat, almost smiling when you sleep, and of your hair that feels much like a child’s; in a room somewhere east of here you may have turned within that thought, caught in the cool scent of bleach and hotels, the white hum of summer night rising towards day.

have little to offer in this time when nothing lasts, only that desire to which you come as to a well. Even the language tells it: to satisfy and sadness rooted on one stock, the faithful breathing back towards shadow of everything that once bent to the sun. And still, the long slanting days pull us in, the warmth, the pitch of the hills, and everything in us wants to give over again— Only a little further, a hand’s extending, a single word; the mirage, beautiful, beckons us on.

Often compared to Amherst or Williams, Wesleyan is really more like Swarthmore. The key difference: Wesleyan is twice as big. Wes students are progressive, politically-minded, and fiercely independent. Exotic specialties like ethnomusicology and East Asian Studies add spice to the scene. (The Elite Liberal Arts Colleges - Wesleyan University)

Humans do not die simply because of Adam’s sin, but because of Adam’s and their own sin.

Original home to the well-rounded, super-achieving, gentle-person jock. Compare to Williams, Middlebury, and Colby. Not Swarthmore, not Wesleyan. Amherst has always been the king in its category—mainly because there are four other major institutions in easy reach to add diversity and depth. (The Elite Liberal Arts Colleges - Amherst College)

(11) To do good as much as is possible to all people as God gives opportunity, especially to those in the body of Christ; by giving food to the hungry, by clothing the destitute, by visiting or helping those who are sick or in prison; by instructing, correcting or encouraging them in love.

I had feigned shock when my acceptance to Wesleyan came in the mail. I wasn’t surprised, but I felt the need to pretend I was, and I didn’t understand why. It would be years before I realized that girls weren’t supposed to own their ambition, just lease it from time to time when it didn’t offend anyone else.

Some historians have suggested that the Wesleyan revival saved England from a bloody revolution like the one France would shortly experience.

This is why Kuyper’s common grace has to be clearly distinguished from the notion of prevenient grace that shows up in a number of traditions, particularly Wesleyanism and Roman Catholicism. From Kuyper’s perspective, prevenient grace is a way of downplaying the extent of human depravity by positing a kind of automatic universal upgrade of those dimensions of human nature that have been corrupted by sin. To put it much too simply, the goal of prevenient grace is the upgrade; it is to raise the deeply wounded human capacities to a level where some measure of freedom to choose or reject obedience to God is made possible. Common grace, on the other hand, is for Kuyper a divine strategy for bringing the cultural designs of God to completion. Common grace operates mysteriously in the life of, say, a Chinese government official or an unbelieving artist to harness their created talents to prepare the creation for the full coming of the kingdom. In this sense, the operations of common grace—unlike those of prevenient grace—always have a goal-directed ad hoc character.

What we haven't imagined will one day spit us out magnificent and simple. -Fury of Rain

What we haven't imagined will one day spit us out magnificent and simple.

That view came to be embodied in a highly influential 1950 report by a special committee of the American Political Science Association, titled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” The commission, chaired by political scientist E. E. Schattschneider of Wesleyan University, argued that the parties should sharpen their ideological appeals, better highlight their differences, nationalize their internal infrastructure, and work to make their core voters more energized and engaged. Some critics could see the risks of such an approach, and they focused precisely on the threat it posed to the capacity of our system to engender cohesion. Political scientist James Q. Wilson warned in 1962 that such reforms would “mean that political conflict will be intensified, social cleavages will be exaggerated, party leaders will tend to be men skilled in the rhetorical arts, and the parties’ ability to produce agreement by trading issue free resources will be reduced.” In retrospect, he was prophetic.

So also a Wesleyan estimation of other religions (as potential examples of the “faith of a servant”), while it need not belittle their adherents’ experiences of the divine, also will “lift up Christ” as the One through whom all convictions, practices, and experiences are to be sifted and judged (the

The Wesleyan tradition, following Wesley not as a guru but as a guide, has then placed great emphasis upon the experience of the Holy Spirit.

It is the Wesleyan tradition—that is, the interpretation of Protestant Christian faith derived primarily from the teachings of John Wesley (1703-91)—that will provide our lens for reading and telling the Story of God.