Nature

"What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?"

"If they find some stain or blemish in a name of note, not grieving that their greatest are so small, inflate themselves with some insane delight, and judge all nature from her feet of clay."

"Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away."

"Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."

"In man, creator and created are united; in man in the material, the fragment, the surplus, the clay, the mud, the foolishness, the chaos; but in man also is the creator, the sculptor, the wielder of the hammer, the beholder of divinity, the seventh day."

"Who are they who speak evil of the clay? The very stars are made of clay like mine!"

"To get wealth and security by guile Is like one who pours water into a pot of unbaked clay."

"Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?"

"Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside, And naked on the Air of Heaven ride, Were't not a Shame — were't not a Shame for him In this clay carcase crippled to abide?"

"This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image."

"These look like the workmanship of heaven; This is the porcelain clay of human kind, And therefore cast into these noble moulds."

"A vase of unbaked clay, when broken, may be remoulded, but not a baked one."

"Clay is embedded in our subconscious. It has been there for at least 50,000 years."

"If we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything."

"How shall we celebrate the day, When God appeared in mortal clay, The mark of worldly scorn."

"The heart -- which may be broken: happy they! Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould, The precious porcelain of human clay, Break with the first fall."

"Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure."

"All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"Do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"

"Fluoridation is the single most effective public health measure to prevent tooth decay and improve oral health over a lifetime, for both children and adults."

"Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?"

"I suppose you are an entomologist" "Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name. No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp."

"The epic of evolution is an attempt at natural history, to be sure – telling the story of the universe, zooming from a macro-story to the micro-story of planet Earth and the human species"

"When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos"

""Epic of evolution" is a term that, within the past three years, has become the theme and title of a number of gatherings. It seems to have been first used by Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson in 1978.* "The evolutionary epic," Wilson wrote in his book On Human Nature, "is probably the best myth we will ever have." Myth as falsehood was not the usage intended by Wilson in this statement. Rather, myth as a grand narrative that provides a people with a placement in time—a meaningful placement that celebrates extraordinary moments of a shared heritage. The epic of evolution is science translated into meaningful story."

"We can root our morality in the epic of evolution in a manner that goes much deeper than that suggested by sociobiologists"

"This epic of evolution covers far more than the story of the evolution of biological life. It is the evolving tale of the creativity, complexity and emergence of new and novel phenomena that comprises all that is today"

"The theologian could rewrite the Epic of Evolution by expanding on the story told by the scientist. The theologian could declare that this evolutionary story has had a plot all along. When God created the world in the beginning, according to this option, God placed a potential into creation which now through evolution is becoming actualized."

"The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic."

"The Epic of Evolution is the 14 billion year narrative of cosmic, planetary, life, and cultural evolution—told in sacred ways. Not only does it bridge mainstream science and a diversity of religious traditions; if skillfully told, it makes the science story memorable and deeply meaningful, while enriching one's religious faith or secular outlook."

"The Epic of Evolution is our warp, destined to endure, commanding our universal gratitude and reverence and commitment... The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story—what we are calling religious naturalism —can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions."

"One can only speak of creation as a process because of the evidence of what often is called the 'epic of evolution': the whole sequence, as unveiled by a gamut of the sciences, from the origins of the universe to the 'hot big bang' to the arrival of homo sapiens on planet earth"

"I shall argue in the pages ahead that Darwin has gifted us with an account of life whose depth, beauty and pathos-when seem in the contest of the larger cosmic Epic of Evolution — exposes us afresh to the raw reality of the sacred and to a resoundingly meaningful universe … theologically interpreted, therefore, the Epic of Evolution is the story of the world's struggle – not always successful or linearly progressive — towards an expansive freedom in the pressure of self-giving grace … We can root our moral life in the cosmic Epic of Evolution in a manner that goes much deeper than that suggested by sociobiologists"

""epic of evolution" as the sacred unfolding of creation...."

"How can the epic of evolution be told in a multitude of personally and collectively meaningful (mythic) ways, so that it inspires billions of human beings with different worldviews to really want, and then successfully manifest, this vision?"

"A single tale of such holy and mysterious content as to capture the soul – scientific in its data, mythic in its form."

"a shared sacred story that honors both objective truth and subjective meaning: For the first time in human history we have a creation story that not only addresses life’s biggest questions—Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Why are we here? How are we to live?—but helps us answer those questions in ways that are both religiously inspiring and scientifically accurate. No longer are subjective meaning and objective truth isolated from one another in separate domains. Both are conveyed through the same story."

"In constructing what we are calling the epic of evolution we are thus taking up religious issues of the most fundamental sort, issues ultimately quite baffling and obscure and shrouded in mystery."

"The epic of evolution not only unifies the natural and social sciences; it bridges science and religion, fact and value, and it smoothly blends the scientifically objective with the culturally relative. The epic also addresses humanity’s most pressing questions. If as a species we are to understand and solve our common problems, if we are to guide our story’s unfolding, we need to understand, in the deep and human way that only story can convey, both our evolutionary past and our future options. We need the epic."

"In our own lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration of climate…Activities in the nonhuman world also reflect the warming of the Arctic-the changed habits and migrations of many fishes, birds, land mammals, and whales."

"There are two kinds of Arctic problems, the imaginary and the real. Of the two, the imaginary are the most real."

"As an eyewitness to the changing topography of the Arctic, I was stunned to see the rapid repercussions of global warming for the region, its wildlife habitat and indigenous cultures."

"Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, empty as paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles."

"Far to the North under the Great Bear, Sápmi shines. Ridge upon ridge, lake stretching into lake. Rocky cliffs, craggy peaks point to the sky. Streams laugh, woods whisper. Steely precipices drop, descend into the stormy sea."

"Some regions are likely to be especially affected by climate change. The Arctic, because of the impacts of high rates of projected warming on natural systems and human communities; Africa, because of low adaptive capacity and projected climate change impacts, Small islands, where there is high exposure of population and infrastructure to projected climate change impacts Asian and African megadeltas, due to large populations and high exposure to sea level rise, storm surges, and river flooding. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report concludes that non-climate stresses can increase vulnerability to climate change by reducing resilience and can also reduce adaptive capacity because of resource deployment towards competing needs. Vulnerable regions face multiple stresses that affect their exposure and sensitivity to various impacts as well as their capacity to adapt. These stresses arise from, for example, current climate hazards, poverty, and unequal access to resources, food insecurity, trends in economic globalization, conflict, and incidence of diseases such as HIV/AIDS."

"Oh!" said Pooh again. "What is the North Pole?" "It's just a thing you discover," said Christopher Robin, not being quite sure himself."

"It is needless to rehearse the utter and degrading loss of individual liberty which results from the orthodox communistic theory that society is itself an organism in which each person is merely an insignificant cell. It is not in anti-Soviet libels, but in the proud reports of Soviet leaders, that we read of the forcible transfer of whole village populations from their ancestral abodes to new locations in the Arctic, and of the arbitrary ordering of Moscow clerks to tasks of manual labour in the farms and forests of Siberia. All these things are logical outgrowths of what the Bolsheviks call their “collectivistic ideology”, and typical examples of the horrors which might fall upon us if communism were to gain a foothold here."

"Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite habitable."

"O proudly name their names who bravely sail To seek brave lost in Arctic snows and seas!"

"The fiery skies of the winter, the summer nights' miraculous sun. Walk against the wind. Climb mountains. Look to the North. More often."