Wright And Wrong Quotes

When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

If a man says something in the woods and there are no women there, is he still wrong?

I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.

… you were so worried about legal and illegal that you never stopped to think about whether it was right or wrong.

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

But even if it was, two wrongs don’t make a right. Your parents have proved that.

One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're wright, but not enough about the subject to know you're wrong.

I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

all I ask is that if at any point it seems like I care please tell me because I really don’t want you getting the wrong impression.

When 'biblical' theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong." (on atonement theories)

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside-- be glad for me.

We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . . 

If you are going to do wrong, at least make sure you don’t get fat from it.

In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air.

The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.

Suddenly Dominic’s expression turned impish, and she knew one of his cheesy lines was coming. He cocked his head at Ivy. “Screw me if I’m wrong, but haven’t we met before?

Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

If you want ‘nice,’ you came to the wrong fucking person. I’m a fully qualified bitch who’ll happily rip you another asshole if you don’t get the fuck out of my office.

Because sometimes doing the right thing when everything else is wrong is all we have left.

Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly. I was bringing a child into this world, and into our long history of trying to do the right think while benefiting mightily from the wrong thing, and I wanted her to see it clearly without the nostalgia that so often softens my anger and desire to tear it down and build a new world in its place.

They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright's evil twin," said Wednesday. "Frank Lloyd Wrong.

And you know that voice in your head that tells you not to do wrong? I have one of those, but it doesn’t give a shit about right and wrong when someone upsets her.

Is constructive criticism really constructive? Not really. You can't make a child better by pointing out what you think is wrong with him or her. Criticism either crushes spirit or elicits defensiveness. Constructive criticism is an interesting combination of words. "Construct" means "to build." "Criticism" means "to tear down" It creates defiance and anger as well.

He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear

If I should say that he is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate. Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them, the condemning sense of guilt. And this is true of all men- whether they be white or black -it is a peculiar and powerful, but common need.

Is it wrong that I see those creamy white legs and just want to mark them with my fangs?” he whispered. “I think if I thought about it for a long time, it would be a bit frightening.” “What is it now?” “Tempting.

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

Jesus wasn’t just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news—something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong.

Here in this world, justice loses, and beauty is weak, and truth is shouted down, and everything goes wrong. But we know, in our souls if not in our hearts, that we deserve better. We deserve and yearn for a world where justice triumphs, and beauty is all powerful and truth cannot be quenched by lies any more than insubstantial shadows can fly from earth to the center of the solar system and strangle the sun. So, to remind ourselves of what we have forgotten, we talk about times in real life when justice triumphed, or the beauty was not marred, or truth could not be hidden.

I believe you’re not scared of commitment. I think you’re scared of committing to the wrong person.

To me—rightly or wrongly—the hallmark of good writing resides precisely in this sense of creating the new, the freedom and the need and the desire to create this new.

our long history of trying to do the right thing while benefitting mightily from the wrong thing

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with my boobies. I grew them myself.

If you want a man to trust you, ask him for a favor. Most people get this part wrong. They try to win people over by offering something to them, but humans instinctively recoil from those who help them. They like the people that they help far better, even if the favor granted is as small as a cigarette.

Wise Christian worship takes fully into account the fact that creation has gone horribly wrong, has been so corrupted and spoiled that a great fault line runs right down the middle of it ... worship of God as redeemer, the lover and rescuer of the world, must always accompany and complete the worship of God as creator.

It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus’s “divine” status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

Why was it considered wrong to ask questions? Was I right when I resisted punishment? It was inconceivable to me that one should surrender to what seemed wrong, and most of the people I had met seemed wrong. Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

It is one thing to insist on walking south when the compass is pointing north. But to “fix” the compass so that it tells you that the wrong way is the right way is far, far worse. You can correct a mistake. But once you tell yourself it wasn’t a mistake there’s no way back.

Baptist minister and inventor Burrell Cannon (1848–1922) led some Pittsburg investors to establish the Ezekiel Airship Company and build a craft described in the Biblical book of Ezekiel. The ship had large fabric-covered wings powered by an engine that turned four sets of paddles. It was built in a nearby machine shop and was briefly airborne at this site late in 1902, a year before the Wright brothers first flew. Enroute to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the airship was destroyed by a storm. A second model crashed and the Rev. Cannon gave up the project.

I’m going to piss you off a lot, Ally. I’m going to mess up, say the wrong things, be crazy jealous, and annoy the shit out of you with how overprotective and interfering I can be. But I’ll never take you for granted, never purposely hurt you, and never betray you in any sense of the word—I swear that to you.

I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked only by living with it. Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what others took for granted; I had to think out what others felt.

was emotionally true because I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will. I resolved that I would emulate the black woman if I were ever faced with a white mob; I would conceal a weapon, pretend that I had been crushed by the wrong done to one of my loved ones; then, just when they thought I had accepted their cruelty as the law of my life, I would let go with my gun and kill as many of them as possible before they killed me. The story of the woman’s deception gave form and meaning to confused defensive feelings that had long been sleeping in me. My imaginings, of course, had no objective

reputation as a womanizer and an adventurer—even your looks.” Lion raised a hand to his jaw. “My looks? What the hell is wrong with my looks?” “Absolutely

the biblical texts themselves might suggest that there were better questions to be asking, which are actually screened out by concentrating on the wrong ones.

I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.

The wrong thing the right way.

I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world.

But behind closed doors, things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long time.

They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright’s evil twin,” said Wednesday. “Frank Lloyd Wrong.

Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them, the condemning sense of guilt.

I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked only by living with it. Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what others took for granted; I had to think out what others felt.

Grief isn’t wrong, but it can paralyze. It can thwart a life. A person can choose to let time stand still, and while they hold the pieces of the past, the hope of their future passes them by.

People even talk of being “on the wrong side of history,” as though they knew not only what the last twenty years had produced, but what the next twenty years were going to produce as well. The idolization of “progress,” of “moving with the times,” is part of the same movement. “Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . .” people begin, as though it were obvious that one’s ethics or theology ought to change with the calendar. All this is a form of creeping pantheism, of looking at certain trends in the wider world and deducing that they are what “God” is doing. (It’s also very selective; it cheerfully screens out all the inventions of modernism, such as guillotines and gas chambers, which do not exactly fit the picture of an upward journey into light.)

The second kind are invited by bad character, and the problems such a person has then cannot be put right until he puts himself right. It is not something a proud man can do, because proud men see no wrongness in themselves.

It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse.

First, Paul is anxious that everyone who professes Christian faith should allow the gospel to transform the whole of their lives, so that the outward signs of the faith express a living reality that comes from the deepest parts of the personality. Second, he is also anxious that each Christian, and especially every teacher of the faith, should know how to build up the community in mutual love and support, rather than, by the wrong sort of teaching or behaviour, tearing it apart.

One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”2 If you “know,” there’s no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.

Remember how much it upset people when we were told that Pluto wasn't a planet anymore? I'm still mad about that. The only thing I knew for sure about space was "the order of all the planets" (My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas), and then that one bit of knowledge was ripped away from me. What mnemonic do kids even use now? I'm aware there are reasons Pluto was demoted, but in my heart, I do not care what Neil deGrasse Tyson says. (Even though I know in my mind he's right, in my heart, I feel he's wrong.)

Our questions have been wrongly put, because they haven’t been about the kingdom. They haven’t been about God’s sovereign, saving rule coming on earth as in heaven. Instead, our questions have been about a “salvation” that rescues people from the world, instead of for the world. “Going to heaven” has been the object (ever since the Middle Ages at least, in the Western church); “sin” is what stops us from getting there; so the cross must deal with sin, so that we can leave this world and go to the much better one in the sky, or in “eternity,” or wherever. But this is simply untrue to the story the gospels are telling—which, again, explains why we’ve all misread these wonderful texts. Whatever the cross achieves must be articulated, if we are to take the four gospels seriously, within the context of the kingdom-bringing victory.

At the heart of Galatians 2 is not an abstract individualized salvation, but a common meal. Paul does not want the Galatians to wait until they have agreed on all doctrinal arguments before they can sit down and eat together. Not to eat together is already to get the answer wrong. The whole point of his argument is that all those who belong to Christ belong at the same table with one another. The relevance of this today should be obvious. The differences between us, as twentieth-century Christians, all too often reflect cultural, philosophical and tribal divides, rather than anything that should keep us apart from full and glad eucharistic fellowship. I believe the church should recognize, as a matter of biblical and Christian obedience, that it is time to put the horse back before the cart, and that we are far, far more likely to reach doctrinal agreement between our different churches if we do so within the context of that common meal which belongs equally to us all because it is the meal of the Lord whom we all worship. Intercommunion, in other words, is not something we should regard as the prize to be gained at the end of the ecumenical road; it is the very paving of the road itself. If we wonder why we haven't been travelling very fast down the road of late, maybe it's because, without the proper paving, we've got stuck in the mud.

We must be constantly aware of our responsibility in the Communion of Saints, without giving our honored predecessors the final say or making them an "alternatvie source," independent of scripture itself. When they speak with one voice, we should listen very carefully. They may be wrong. They sometimes are. But we ignore them at our peril.

Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt.

The myths record the earliest attempt at an explanation of the world and its life; the fairy tale records the free and joyful play of the imagination, opening doors through hard conditions to the spirit, which craves power, freedom, happiness; righting wrongs and redressing injuries; defeating base designs; rewarding patience and virtue; crowning true love with happiness;

Phaethon asked: “Do you think there is something wrong with the Sophotechs? We are Manorials, father! We let Rhadamanthus control our finances and property, umpire our disputes, teach our children, design our thoughtscapes, and even play matchmaker to find us wives and husbands!” “Son, the Sophotechs may be sufficient to advise the Parliament on laws and rules. Laws are a matter of logic and common sense. Specially designed human-thinking versions, like Rhadamanthus, can tell us how to fulfill our desires and balance our account books. Those are questions of strategy, of efficient allocation of resources and time. But the Sophotechs, they cannot choose our desires for us. They cannot guide our culture, our values, our tastes. That is a question of the spirit.” “Then what would you have us do? Would you change our laws?” “Our mores, not our laws. There are many things which are repugnant, deadly to the spirit, and self-destructive, but which law should not forbid. Addiction, self-delusion, self-destruction, slander, perversion, love of ugliness. How can we discourage such things without the use of force? It was in response to this need that the College of Hortators evolved. Peacefully, by means of boycotts, public protests, denouncements, and shunnings, our society can maintain her sanity against the dangers to our spirit, to our humanity, to which such unboundried liberty, and such potent technology, exposes us.” (...) But Phaethon certainly did not want to hear a lecture, not today. “Why are you telling me all this? What is the point?” “Phaethon, I will let you pass through those doors, and, once through, you will have at your command all the powers and perquisites I myself possess. The point of my story is simple. The paradox of liberty of which you spoke before applies to our entire society. We cannot be free without being free to harm ourselves. Advances in technology can remove physical dangers from our lives, but, when they do, the spiritual dangers increase. By spiritual danger I mean a danger to your integrity, your decency, your sense of life. Against those dangers I warn you; you can be invulnerable, if you choose, because no spiritual danger can conquer you without your own consent. But, once they have your consent, those dangers are all-powerful, because no outside force can come to your aid. Spiritual dangers are always faced alone. It is for this reason that the Silver-Gray School was formed; it is for this reason that we practice the exercise of self-discipline. Once you pass those doors, my son, you will be one of us, and there will be nothing to restrain you from corruption and self-destruction except yourself. “You have a bright and fiery soul, Phaethon, a power to do great things; but I fear you may one day unleash such a tempest of fire that you may consume yourself, and all the world around you.

Receiving grace is a lot easier to handle than giving grace to those who have hurt us and need it. Few realize how much they hurt themselves when they refuse to forgive those who they think have wronged them. The perceived wrongdoer sleeps at night while they let hate and anger fester and tear them apart inside. They continue with their life while those who refuse to grant grace to them destroy their relationship with the God who poured out his grace on them.

Believing in the second coming itself is anything but arrogant. The whole point of it is to insist, over against not only the wider pagan world, but against all self-delusion or pretension within the church, that Jesus remains sovereign and will return at last to put everything right. This putting right (the biblical word for it is “justice”) is the sort of sigh-of-relief event that the whole world, at its best and at many other times too, longs for most deeply. All sorts of things are out of joint, both on a large and a small scale, in the world; and God the creator will put them straight. All sorts of things are still going wrong, corrupting the lives of human beings and the larger life of the environment, the planet itself; God the creator will put them right. All sorts of things are still wrong with us, Jesus’s followers; Jesus, when he comes, will put us right as well. That may not be comfortable, but it’s what we need.

He’s not a bad choice, Elsie. He’s titled, wealthy, and virile.” Elsie’s cheeks heated. “Did you say virile?” Ogden smirked. “It’s hard not to notice.” She covered her face with both hands, hiding her embarrassment. Until another realization hit her, making her stomach drop. “Oh no,” she whispered. Ogden tensed. “What’s wrong?” Slowly, she dropped her hands from her face and lifted her eyes. “If I marry him…” Ogden leaned closer. “My name will be Elsie Kelsey,” she finished, mortified. Oh, how the Wright sisters would love that.

It is, once again, fatally easy to misunderstand, to draw the lines wrong, to see “our present system” as automatically good, so that anyone who disturbs it—as Jesus was disturbing the system of the scribes and Pharisees—must be “satanic,” must be from the dark side. That road leads to the “war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness,” as at Qumran: the overbright light of an overrealized eschatology, enabling “us” to see ourselves as “children of light,” casting a surreal, overdramatized shadow over “them,” the “children of darkness.

It used to be that when I made mistakes like this or came close to losing my life, I would just call Miguel. He'd drop it all to come to me—his movies, media engagements no matter how big they were, and even his criminal activities went on hold for me. It made me think he cared. Miguel canceled an appearance on the Dave Letterman show just because he called me and thought my voice sounded like something was wrong. He directed his gaze to the bruises decorating my face. “You said you weren't hurt.” With those big arms, he picked me up and slammed the door behind us. “When I ask you if you're okay, you tell me the truth.

Oh, how an animal that is hurt looks up at you, John! An animal’s actions can inform you if it is in pain. It don’t hop and jump around as usual. No. You find a sad, crouching, cringing, small bunch of fur or hair, whining, and plainly asking you to aid it. It isn't hard to find out what is wrong, John; any man or woman who would pass by such a sight, just isn't worth knowing. I just can’t withstand it! Why, I think that not only animals, but plants can know pain. I carry a drink to many a poor, thirsty growing thing; or, if it is torn up I put it kindly back, and fix its soil up as comfortably as I can. Anything that is living, John, is worthy of Man’s aid.

If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. A common way of earning a living gives them a common attitude toward life. Even their speech is colored and shaped by what they must undergo. Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in its place with its own rights, needs, and aspirations. What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this new form of life that has grown up here in our midst that puzzles us, that expresses itself, like a weed growing from under a stone, in terms we call crime. Unless we grasp this problem in the light of this new reality, we cannot do more than salve our feelings of guilt and rage with more murder when a man, living under such conditions, commits an act which we call a crime.

The cross, we note, already had a symbolic meaning throughout the Roman world, long before it had a new one for the Christians. It meant: we Romans run this place, and if you get in our way we’ll obliterate you—and do it pretty nastily too. Crucifixion meant that the kingdom hadn’t come, not that it had. Crucifixion of a would-be Messiah meant that he wasn’t the Messiah, not that he was. When Jesus was crucified, every single disciple knew what it meant: we backed the wrong horse. The game is over. Whatever their expectations, and however Jesus had been trying to redefine those expectations, as far as they were concerned hope had crumbled into ashes. They knew they were lucky to escape with their own lives.

Within this narrative, creation itself is understood as a kind of Temple, a heaven-and-earth duality, where humans function as the “image-bearers” in the cosmic Temple, part of earth yet reflecting the life and love of heaven. This is how creation was designed to function and flourish: under the stewardship of the image-bearers. Humans are called not just to keep certain moral standards in the present and to enjoy God’s presence here and hereafter, but to celebrate, worship, procreate, and take responsibility within the rich, vivid developing life of creation. According to Genesis, that is what humans were made for. The diagnosis of the human plight is then not simply that humans have broken God’s moral law, offending and insulting the Creator, whose image they bear—though that is true as well. This lawbreaking is a symptom of a much more serious disease. Morality is important, but it isn’t the whole story. Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself. The name for this is idolatry. The result is slavery and finally death. It isn’t just that humans do wrong things and so incur punishment. This is one element of the larger problem, which isn’t so much about a punishment that might seem almost arbitrary, perhaps even draconian; it is, rather, about direct consequences. When we worship and serve forces within the creation (the creation for which we were supposed to be responsible!), we hand over our power to other forces only too happy to usurp our position. We humans have thus, by abrogating our own vocation, handed our power and authority to nondivine and nonhuman forces, which have then run rampant, spoiling human lives, ravaging the beautiful creation, and doing their best to turn God’s world into a hell (and hence into a place from which people might want to escape). As I indicated earlier, some of these “forces” are familiar (money, sex, power). Some are less familiar in the popular mind, not least the sense of a dark, accusing “power” standing behind all the rest. Called

What’s wrong with men and women indulging in self-delusion in the course of trying to impress each other? Nothing, I guess. Some illusions are harmless, and some are even beneficial. Far be it from me to try to talk you out of all your illusions. By and large, my philosophy is Live and let live: if you’re enjoying the Matrix, go crazy. Except, maybe, when your illusions harm other people in your life or contribute to larger problems in the world. And that can happen. Being in self-protection mode, for example, does more than just give us an attraction to crowds. In one study, men who watched part of a scary film (The Silence of the Lambs) and were then shown photos of men from a different ethnic group rated their facial expressions as much angrier than did men who hadn’t seen a scary film.

I sure do like this sculpture.” Jolene smiled at the newcomer. “Well, hello, Lou.” The Devil sent her a narrow-eyed look. “Hello, vile woman.” “You buttoned up your shirt wrong,” Jolene told him. “What?” he squeaked, peeking down at the shirt. Realizing she was kidding, he flattened his lips. “See, vile.” Jolene rolled her eyes. “Let it go, Lou.” Sensing there was more to this than the shirt comment, Harper asked, “Let what go? What did you do, Grams?” Jolene tipped her chin at Lou. “He was in a bad mood, so thought I’d take him to a nice, calming atmosphere to cheer him up. Only there is no cheering him up.” Harper wasn’t buying that innocent act for a single second. “Where did you take him?” “To a poetry recital.” Lou’s face hardened. “The words hardly ever rhymed! How is that poetry?” And it clearly drove his OCD streak crazy.

Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” 6 African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.7 Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth. Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test. College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become. Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

If Thomas represents an epistemology of faith, which transcends but also includes historical and scientific knowing, we might suggest that Paul represents at this point an epistemology of hope. In 1 Corinthians 15 he sketches his argument that there will be a future resurrection as part of God’s new creation, the redemption of the entire cosmos as in Romans 8. Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen. There is more to be said about this, but not here. All of which brings us to Peter. Epistemologies of faith and hope, both transcending and including historical and scientific knowing, point on to an epistemology of love—an idea I first met in Bernard Lonergan but that was hardly new with him. The story of John 21 sharpens it up. Peter, famously, has denied Jesus. He has chosen to live within the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them. But now, with Easter, Peter is called to live in a new and different world. Where Thomas is called to a new kind of faith and Paul to a radically renewed hope, Peter is called to a new kind of love.15 Here

Of course, historical scholarship on the New Testament is open to all, whether Jewish or Christian, atheist or agnostic. But the present debate about Paul and justification is taking place between people most of whom declare their allegiance to Scripture in general, and perhaps to Paul in particular, as the place where and the means by which the living God has spoken, and still speaks, with life-changing authority. This ought to mean, but does not always mean, that exegesis-close attention to the actual flow of the text, to the questions that it raises in itself and the answers it gives in and of itself-should remain the beginning and the end of the process. Systematize all you want in between-we all do it; there is nothing wrong with it and much to be said for it, particularly when it involves careful comparing of different treatments of similar topics in different contexts. But start with exegesis, and remind yourself that the end in view is not a tidy system, sitting in hard covers on a shelf where one may look up "correct answers," but the sermon, or the shared pastoral reading, or the scriptural word to a Synod or other formal church gathering, or indeed the life of witness to the love of God, through all of which the church is built up and energized for mission, the Christian is challenged, transformed and nurtured in the faith, and the unbeliever is confronted with the shocking but joyful news that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. That is letting Scripture be Scripture. Scripture, in other words, does not exist to give authoritative answers to questions other than those it addresses-not even to the questions which emerged from especially turbulent years such as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is not to say that one cannot deduce from Scripture appropriate answers to such later questions, only that you have to be careful and recognize that that is indeed what you are doing.

true—helping a hurting person is a bit scary. We want to do the right thing, not the wrong thing—say what will help, not what will hurt. To add to our confusion, our friend is “not quite herself.” She’s different. We want our friend fixed and back to normal. All you have to do is care. Harold Ivan Smith described the process so well: Grief sharers always look for an opportunity to actively care. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief, but you can wash the sink full of dishes, listen to him or her talk, take his or her kids to the park. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief but you can visit the cemetery with him or her. Grief sharing is not about fixing—it’s about showing up. Coming alongside. Being interruptible. “Hanging out” with the bereaving. In the words of World War II veterans, “present and reporting for duty.” The grief path is not a brief path. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.[1] What can you expect from a friend who is hurting? Actually, not very much. And the more her experience moves beyond a loss and closer to a crisis or trauma, the more this is true. Sometimes you’ll see a friend experiencing a case of the “crazies.” Her response seems irrational. She’s not herself. Her behavior is different from or even abnormal compared to the person not going through a major loss. Just remember, she’s reacting to an out-of-the-ordinary event. What she experienced is abnormal, so her response is actually quite normal. If what the person has experienced is traumatic she may even seem to exhibit some of the symptoms of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). And because your friend is this way, she is not to be avoided. Others are needed at this time in her life. These are responses you can expect. Your friend is no longer functioning as she once did—and probably won’t for a while. You Are Needed You are needed when a person experiences a sudden intrusion or disruption in her life. If you (or another friend) aren’t available, the only person she has to talk with for guidance, support, and direction is herself. And who wants support from someone struggling with a case of the “crazies”? But a problem may arise when your friend doesn’t realize that she needs you, at least at that particular time. Your sensitivity is needed at this point. Remember, when your friend is hurting and facing a loss, you are dealing with a loss as well, because the relationship you had with your friend has changed. It’s not the same.

YOU FIRST When entering into relationships, we have a tendency to bend. We bend closer to one another, because regardless of what type of relationship it might be — romantic, business, friendship — there’s a reason you’re bringing that other person into your life, and that means the load is easier to carry if you carry it together, both bending toward the center. I picture people in relationships as two trees, leaning toward one another. Over time, as the relationship solidifies, you both become more comfortable bending, and as such bend farther, eventually resting trunk to trunk. You support each other and are stronger because of the shared strength of your root system and entwined branches. Double-tree power! But there’s a flaw in this mode of operation. Once you’ve spent some time leaning on someone else, if they disappear — because of a breakup, a business upset, a death, a move, an argument — you’re all that’s left, and far weaker than when you started. You’re a tree leaning sideways; the second foundation that once supported you is…gone. This is a big part of why the ending of particularly strong relationships can be so disruptive. When your support system presupposes two trunks — two people bearing the load, and divvying up the responsibilities; coping with the strong winds and hailstorms of life — it can be shocking and uncomfortable and incredibly difficult to function as an individual again; to be just a solitary tree, alone in the world, dealing with it all on your own. A lone tree needn’t be lonely, though. It’s most ideal, in fact, to grow tall and strong, straight up, with many branches. The strength of your trunk — your character, your professional life, your health, your sense of self — will help you cope with anything the world can throw at you, while your branches — your myriad interests, relationships, and experiences — will allow you to reach out to other trees who are likewise growing up toward the sky, rather than leaning and becoming co-dependent. Relationships of this sort, between two equally strong, independent people, tend to outlast even the most intertwined co-dependencies. Why? Because neither person worries that their world will collapse if the other disappears. It’s a relationship based on the connections between two people, not co-dependence. Being a strong individual first alleviates a great deal of jealousy, suspicion, and our innate desire to capture or cage someone else for our own benefit. Rather than worrying that our lives will end if that other person disappears, we know that they’re in our lives because they want to be; their lives won’t end if we’re not there, either. Two trees growing tall and strong, their branches intertwined, is a far sturdier image than two trees bent and twisted, tying themselves into uncomfortable knots to wrap around one another, desperately trying to prevent the other from leaving. You can choose which type of tree to be, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with either model; we all have different wants, needs, and priorities. But if you’re aiming for sturdier, more resilient relationships, it’s a safe bet that you’ll have better options and less drama if you focus on yourself and your own growth, first. Then reach out and connect with others who are doing the same.

Even when theologians and preachers have seen this danger and have insisted that what was achieved on the cross was the direct result of the Father’s love, when the goal is Platonized (“going to heaven”) and the human role is moralized (“good and bad behavior”), the structure of the implicit story will still run in the wrong direction.

The passage has regularly been read as the vital move in the wrong story— the story, once again, of a “works contract” in which, to put it crudely, humans sin, God punishes Jesus, and humans are let off. This omits elements that were vital for Paul

that God’s call of Abraham and his family was designed to put right what was wrong with the world.

The Western world has supposed, for two hundred years and more, that splitting off questions of social justice from questions of God and faith would give us a more just society. The revolutions, totalitarianisms, and all-out wars of that period have proved us wrong. But to put God and human justice back together again will require a sustained effort, not only by individuals but by the church as a whole, developing the corporate virtues of justice-work that will become habits of the church’s heart and will appeal to the conscience of the wider world.

When they argued about the propeller, the Wright brothers were making a common mistake. Each was preaching about why he was right and why the other was wrong. When we argue about why, we run the risk of becoming emotionally attached to our positions and dismissive of the other side’s. We’re more likely to have a good fight if we argue about how.

There is nothing wrong with spontaneous worship, just as there’s nothing wrong with two friends meeting by chance, grabbing a sandwich from a shop, and going off together for an impromptu picnic. But if the friends get to know one another better and decide to meet more regularly, they might decide that, though they could indeed repeat the picnic from time to time, a better setting for their friendship, and a way of showing that friendship in action, might be to take thought over proper meals for one another and prepare thoroughly. In the same way, good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared—an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about. In particular, Christian worship is all about the church celebrating God’s mighty acts, the acts of creation and covenant followed by the acts of new creation and new covenant. The church needs constantly to learn, and constantly to be working on, the practice of telling and retelling the great stories of the world and Israel, especially the creation and the Exodus; the great promises that emerged from those stories; and the ways in which those promises came to their fruition in Jesus Christ. The reading of scripture—the written account of those stories—has therefore always been central to the church’s worship. It isn’t only that people need to be reminded what the stories say. It’s that these stories should be rehearsed in acts of celebration and worship, “telling out the greatness of the Lord,” as Mary sang in the Magnificat. Good liturgy uses tried and tested ways of making sure that scripture is read thoroughly and clearly, and is constantly on the lookout for ways of doing it even more effectively—just as good liturgy is also eager to discover better and better ways of singing and praying the Psalms together, so that they come to be “second nature” within the memory, imagination, and spirituality of all the worshipping faithful, not just of a few musically minded leaders.

To suggest, therefore, that as Christians we should support the state of Israel because it is the fulfilment of prophecy is, in a quite radical way, to cut off the branch on which we are sitting. It is directly analogous to the mistake of the Galatians, who thought that if they were members of Abraham’s family they should go the whole way and get circumcised. It is similar to the mistake of which the Reformers accused the mediaeval Catholics, of supposing that in every Mass they were actually re-crucifying Jesus, when Jesus’ death had been once and for all, never to be repeated, on Calvary. It is a way of saying that in the cross and resurrection God did not actually fulfil his whole saving purpose; that Jesus did not in fact achieve the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy; that his resurrection was not the start of God’s new age; that Acts is wrong, Romans is wrong, Galatians is wrong, the letter to the Hebrews is wrong, Revelation is wrong. Say that if you like, but don’t claim to be Christian in doing so.

In July 2014, Ted tapped Brian Wright, a senior vice president at Nickelodeon, to lead young adult content deals. (Brian’s first Netflix claim to fame is signing the deal for a show called Stranger Things just a few months into the job.) Brian tells this story about Ted receiving feedback publicly on Brian’s first day at Netflix: In all my past jobs, it was all about who’s in and who’s out of favor. If you gave the boss feedback or disagreed with her in a meeting in front of others, that would be political death. You would find yourself in Siberia. Monday morning, it’s my first day of this brand-new job, and I’m on hyperalert trying to find out what are the politics of the place. At eleven a.m. I attend my first meeting led by Ted (my boss’s boss, who is from my perspective a superstar), with about fifteen people at various levels in the company. Ted was talking about the release of The Blacklist season 2. A guy four levels below him hierarchically stopped him in the middle of his point: “Ted, I think you’ve missed something. You’re misunderstanding the licensing deal. That approach won’t work.” Ted stuck to his guns, but this guy didn’t back down. “It won’t work. You’re mixing up two separate reports, Ted. You’ve got it wrong. We need to meet with Sony directly.” I could not believe that this low-level guy would confront Ted Sarandos himself in front of a group of people. From my past experience, this was equivalent to committing career suicide. I was literally scandalized. My face was completely flushed. I wanted to hide under my chair. When the meeting ended, Ted got up and put his hand on this guy’s shoulder. “Great meeting. Thanks for your input today,” he said with a smile. I practically had to hold my jaw shut, I was so surprised. Later I ran into Ted in the men’s washroom. He asked how my first day was going so I told him, “Wow Ted, I couldn’t believe the way that guy was going at you in the meeting.” Ted looked totally mystified. He said, “Brian, the day you find yourself sitting on your feedback because you’re worried you’ll be unpopular is the day you’ll need to leave Netflix. We hire you for your opinions. Every person in that room is responsible for telling me frankly what they think.

The first time I ever heard Frank Lloyd Wright’s name, I was being told he was brilliant, which means the first time I looked at a building he designed, I thought either, “That is what brilliance looks like,” or “This is what everyone else recognizes as brilliance.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

Comparisons of women and Blacks continue throughout the book, but they never meet in, say, the category of “black woman.” In one section, de Beauvoir compares anti-Black racism to anti-feminism, saying that antifeminists offer “separate but equal” status to women in the same way that Jim Crow subjects Blacks to extreme forms of discrimination. There are, she says, “deep analogies” between women and Blacks; both must be liberated from the same paternalism and master class that wants to keep them in their place. In every comparison that de Beauvoir makes between women and Blacks, however, the Blacks are assumed to be American and male and the women are assumed to be white. In The Second Sex, she uses the character Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son to evoke the parallel—but not intersecting—situation of women: “he watches planes pass and knows that because he is black the sky is out of bounds for him. Because she is woman, the girl knows that the sea and the poles, a thousand adventures, a thousand joys are forbidden to her: she is born on the wrong side.”9 It does not seem to occur to her that one could be oppressed by both of these systems, race and gender.

Yet Jesus went further. When people asked him for ‘a sign from heaven’, he saw their request as a sign of unbelief. They wanted things to be obvious. The only sign he would give them, he said, was another prophetic sign: the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12.39). Jonah disappeared into the belly of the whale – and then came out alive, three days later. That, said Jesus, was the ‘sign’ that would tell his generation what was going on. The other ‘signs’ that Jesus was doing were not negative ones. They were not like the prophetic ‘signs’ to which Amos referred, or indeed like the ‘signs’ that Moses and Aaron performed in Egypt to try to shake Pharaoh out of his complacency and allow the Israelites to go free. Those ‘signs’ were strange warning signals: plagues of frogs, or locusts, or rivers turning into blood. Jesus’ ‘signs’ (John gives us a neat catalogue of them) were all about new creation: water into wine, healings, food for the hungry, sight for the blind, life for the dead. The other Gospels chip in with several more, including parties with all the wrong kind of people, indicating a future full of forgiveness. All these were forward-looking signs, declaring the new thing that God was doing. Was doing now.

It wasn’t as if they went on killing sprees for fun. They didn’t bother you so long as you didn’t bother them. But if you pushed their buttons, they’d proceed to attack in a snarling, hissing, unholy display of pure fury—giving zero thought to whether their enemies were bigger, stronger, armed, or accompanied by backup. And what was wrong with that?

two wrongs don’t make a right. Your parents have proved that.

God gave us the freedom to work things out for ourselves, but we came up with the wrong answers. Life is a gift to be shared. Mankind is supposed to be a glorious, loving family, but instead, we allowed ourselves to become a species of individuals

I think you very well might.” Birdy’ air shifted from friend to wise mentor.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. ​— ​Theodore Roosevelt

[Paul] is the kind of man you want on your side in a debate but who may just alienate more sensitive souls. He confronts the magistrates at Philippi; he is itching to speak to the vast crowd in Ephesus; he tries to explain himself to the Jerusalem mob that had been trying to lynch him; he rebukes the high priest. He knows how to turn the factions in the Sanhedrin against one another. He lectures the Roman governor himself about justice, self-control, and the coming judgment. He tells the ship owner where he should and shouldn’t spend the winter, and then says, “I told you so” when it all goes horribly wrong. He spots the sailors who are trying to bolt and tells the centurion to stop them. As a companion, he must have been exhilarating when things were going well and exasperating when they weren’t. As an opponent, he could cause some people to contemplate murder as their only recourse.