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There Is No Such Thing As Secular - Glory to God For All Things

Fr. Stephen Freeman glory2godforallthings.com

The Present Truth [Annotated, Updated]: A Collection of Sermons Preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle

Charles H. Spurgeon

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Cover of The Present Truth [Annotated, Updated]: A Collection of Sermons Preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle

We do not attain anything by our own holiness but by ten thousand surrenders to mercy. A lifetime of received forgiveness allows us to become mercy. Mercy becomes our energy, our meaning. Perhaps we are finally enlightened and free when we can both receive mercy and give it away—without payment or punishment.

Richard Rohr • Receiving God’s Mercy

Pavel Florensky

David Bentley Hart • The Story of Christianity

Gabriel Marcel, a Christian among the existentialists, appreciated our road-hunger. Marcel described humanity as homo viator, “itinerate man.” But he was staunchly critical of Sartre’s view of freedom. Freedom isn’t digging a tunnel to escape, he counseled; it’s digging down into yourself.

James K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I... See more

To read Augustine in the twenty-first century is to gain a vantage point that makes all of our freedom look like addiction.

James K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

Father Richard Rohr describes the “eagerness to love” that characterized the life and spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226):

If our only goal is to love, there is no such thing as failure. Francis of Assisi succeeded in living in a single-hearted way, in which his only goal was to love. This intense eagerness to love made his whole

You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.