Sublime

in both evangelical and mainline churches, faith formation has been seen as the process of raising consciousness. And while in some ways this seems to honor the age of authenticity, it also tends to turn faith into a cultural reality that loses the purview of divine action.

I run in the grooves that everyone else is running in; the rutted paths worn by others become the easiest way to go.

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

Youthfulness is so near authenticity (being its core expression) because we have been convinced by Freud that the desires of the id are most genuine; they are our most authentic self.

The sermon now needed to enter the personality of the listener. And Henry realized that the only key that fit the lock of individual personality was personality itself.

time wasn’t frozen in a linear progression as we now assume. Certain moments cast meaning over all of ordinary life by shifting time. The people to whom Augustine, Becket, and Edwards ministered had a shared imagination (a “social imaginary” as Taylor calls it)6 that led them to assume that Good Friday in the year 435, 1138, or 1752 was closer to t