Environmentalists From The United States

"School textbooks, unfortunately, sometimes render science as dogmatic as any fundamentalist doctrine. In truth, science is quintessentially open to revision and discovery."

"[M]any... believers have rejected evolution because... [it] has been depicted as random, meaningless, mechanistic, and Godless. The growing edge of evolutionary thinking... points to a very different understanding... a... realistic picture of divine creativity. ...a Universe astonishingly ...suited for life and ...consciousness."

"[T]he fact that our Universe has been transforming along a discernible path for billions of years—the fact that creation was not a one-time event—is of little or no dispute. ...[T]his undeniable fact ...makes me want to shout from the mountaintops: "...The war is over!""

"Traditional religions have played crucial roles in fostering cooperation within each tribe, kingdom, and early nation—though not infrequently by provoking suspicion and enmity of those outside the group. ...[T]o fulfill their potentials in our postmodern world, each will have to harmonize its core doctrines with the evolutionary world view. ...[T]he evolutionary outlook bolsters their core teachings. Instead of an intrusion... a precious blessing."

"Each and every human being who has ever brought anything of beauty, value, or importance into the world has done so only because... impregnated or in-spirited by some aspect of Beauty, Truth, Love, or other attributes of God. This... is beyond comprehension, beyond... force or free will. ...as if some power greater than ourselves is at work. ...There is a sense of having served, like Mary, as a vessel for something ...greater than our own capacities. ...[[[w:Peak experience|P]eak experience]]s are religious moments ...The story of Jesus's conception can remind us of such miracles in our ...lives."

"Scientists... are moving away from a mechanistic... way of thinking and into an emergent, developmental worldview. Evolution... can be embraced as God glorifying and Christ edifying."

"Evolutionary versions of each religion... are emerging. ...[A]dherents of each religion have discovered ...Religious insights and perspectives freed from the narrowness of their time and place of origin are more comprehensive and grounded in measurable reality ...Evolution does not diminish religion; it expands its meaning and value globally."

"The ancient religious paths are aching for coherence with the great discoveries born of the quest to understand this... Universe, the living world, our evolved selves, and... our innermost psyches."

"Connie was a self-described atheist, and her professional life was steeped in the sciences. My life was devoted to religion. Our union embraces both."

"[W]e were watching... Evolution: A Journey into Where We Came From and Where We're Going. ...episode ..."What About God?" It examined the struggle that conservative Christian college students face in trying to embrace both evolution and a pre-evolutionary interpretation of their faith. ...Connie ...said, "You need to be out there talking to those students. ...to show how an evolutionary understanding can enrich one's faith!" ...A few weeks later, after a frustrating day at work, I told her (not really serious...) "...I wish we could travel non-stop, teaching and preaching the Great Story ..." Her response... "I'd love to do that!""

"I met Connie Barlow at a lecture... Connie was the author of four books, and two of them had "evolution" in their titles... She, too, was a long-time "epic of evolution" enthusiast. ...[H]er passion for sharing a sacred understanding of cosmic history was no less than mine. Seven months later I asked Connie to marry me."

"To agnostics, humanists, atheists, and freethinkers... you will find nothing here that you cannot wholeheartedly embrace as... rationally sound, mainstream scientific understanding of the Universe. ...[T]he vision of "evolutionary spirituality" presented here will benefit you and your loved ones without your needing to believe in anything otherworldly."

"[W]e chose to display on our van both a Jesus fish and a Darwin fish—kissing. A retired biology professor... laughed, "Oh great! Now you piss everyone off!""

"Discussing Thank God for Evolution! with those you care about will open new doors of possibility... and provide common ground where none existed before. This book is a perfect gift, not to convert others to your way of thinking but to converse... deeply and heartfully about those things that matter most."

"I wrote Thank God for Evolution! mostly to help religious believers from different traditions move toward an evidential worldview without having to abandon their tradition and join the atheist/humanist camp to do so. ...Few things are more important... than for... of religious believers... to embrace a science-based understanding of the world. ...Trying to understand reality without an evolutionary worldview is like trying to understand infection without microscopes or the structure of the universe without telescopes. It's... impossible."

"I dedicate this book to the glory of God."

"God's gift of science reveals that our faith traditions are... meaningful and grounded in undeniable reality... When we focus... on points of broad consensus rather than... legitimate disagreement, conflicts... lose their grip."

"I promise that this book will provide... an experience of science, and evolution specifically, that will fire your imagination, touch your heart, and lead you to a place of deep gratitude, awe, and reverence."

"You will... find here effective ways to talk about evolution to any friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors who are biblical literalists or young earth creationists."

"She was for me the first great modern writer from the South, and was, in any case, the only one I had read who wrote such sly, demythifying sentences about white women as: "The woman would be more or less pretty-yellow hair, fat ankles, muddy-colored eyes."

"Flannery O'Connor-I use her all the time in my classes, and I tell my students, "Look, look what she's done." The students'd say, "Oh, she just writes about the same old area and countryside." "Well," I said, "yes, that's true. I understand as a person, especially as she was ill in her later years, she really didn't move around very much," and I said, "and that in a sense is one of her greatest achievements, just to take these same sorts of things again and again and again to make these magnificent stories, you know."

"O’Connor’s works are full of evil mockery, occasionally reminiscent of Baudelaire or Kundera. Don’t expect to find things like love, tenderness, or sentiment in her stories. This makes me tremendously happy."

"The greatest of Flannery O'Connor's books is her last, post-humously-published collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. Though it is customary to interpret O'Connor's allusion to the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin as ironic, it seems to me that there is no irony involved. There are many small ironies in these nine stories, certainly, and they are comic-grotesque and flamboyant and heartbreaking- but no ultimate irony is intended and the book is not a tragic one. It is a collection of revelations; like all revelations, it points to a dimension of experiential truth that lies outside the sphere of the questing, speculative mind, but which is nevertheless available to all."

"I can think of no American writer who has made a more devastating use of existential intuition. She does so, of course, without declamation, without program, without distributing manifestoes, and without leading a parade."

"There are lots of women writers in the South, like Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, who wrap you up in a story. They come from a tradition of storytellers which is amazingly similar to the Puerto Rican cuento. "Te voy a echar un cuento," eso era eso era lo que Mamá decía. (CDH: The tradition of oral transmission is common among minorities, especially among immigrants.) JOC: Of course. When you read Flannery O'Connor, you almost hear her. It wasn't until I was an adult that I discovered Latino writers who do the same thing, but by that time I had been influenced by the storytellers of the South and by my grandmother."

"That's one of the reasons I love O'Connor: Everything is so Catholic and bizarre at the same time."

"...Men and women do not write differently. In the United States, for example, the best of contemporary prose-writers is a woman - Flannery O'Connor - recently deceased."

"As Flannery O'Connor once noted, writers are difficult biographical subjects; her own life story, O'Connor said, consisted mostly of walking from the house to the barn and back again."

"Every young writer should read Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find at least three or four times. If you’ve ever thought creativity was opposed to clarity, or that funny stories aren’t serious, or that stories about abnormal people are about abnormal people, or that the road to the realistic was through realism—O’Connor is here to disabuse you, with pleasure. And do take note of her characterization and story structure, too! Textbook."

"Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian scepticism. It will keep you free-not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you."

"Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge. The reason this clash doesn't bother me any longer is because I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can't fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. I might suggest that you look into some of the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenom of Man et al.). He was a paleontologist-helped to discover Peking man-and also a man of God. I don't suggest you go to him for answers but for different questions, for that stretching of the imagination that you need to make you a sceptic in the face of much that you are learning, much of which is new and shocking but which when boiled down becomes less so and takes its place in the general scheme of things."

"charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity."

"Conviction without experience makes for harshness. (1955)"

"About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do"

"One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life. This sounds like a paradox, but I have often found it to be true."

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. (1955)"

"If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few is it a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture; if one isn't satisfactory read others. Don't think that you I have to abandon reason to be a Christian. A book that might help you is The Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson. Another is Newman's The Grammar of Assent. To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and you have to go to the most intelligent ones"

"I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times. (1959)"

"The short story writer particularly has to learn to read life in a way that includes the most possibilities--like the medieval commentators on scripture, who found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text. If you see things in depth, you will be more liable to write them that way. (1959)"

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. (1958)"

"He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn't have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. ("A Late Encounter with the Enemy")"

"Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. (beginning of "Good Country People")"

"The Negro will in the matter of a few years have his constitutional rights and we will all then see that the business of getting along with each other is much the same as it has always been, even though new manners are called for. The fiction writer is interested in individuals, not races; he knows that good and evil are not apportioned along racial lines and when he deals with topical matters, if he is any good, he sees the long run through the short run. (1963)"

"I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both. (1956)"

"The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions."

"There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention."

"Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't write fiction. It isn't grand enough for you."

"The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience."

"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one."

"No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made."