Mary Augusta Ward Quotes

In other words, I'd say the whole story of Bob Dylan is one man's search for God. The turns and the steps he takes to find God are his business. I think he went to a study group at the Vineyard, and it created a lot of excitement.

When I was almost 13 I was ripe for religion. I was actually just plain ripe.

For me, God is in my life. I don't hide from that... I think the search has been on since the '60s.

Physically, I've seen a change in my life. No, I haven't had a face lift or anything like that. I've grown. That's God's countenance.

The movement toward choosing religion, rampant as it is, shouldn't be surprising. Ours is an era marked by the desire to define - or redefine - ourselves.

It just took all of that to come to a screeching halt, to get to the point of having nothing, for me to finally realize, Hey, what are you fighting with this for? Until then, I hadn't claimed my faith as my own; I had just grown up with it.

From the early Seventies to the mid-Eighties, I approached Rome at a snail's pace. Having concluded that God existed, I could not seriously entertain the thought of not trying to be in contact with Him.

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by... worried... about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.

Every worldview I chose, it seemed, edged me toward belief.

Death is the prerequisite to resurrection, the new life God intends.

God strengthened me and taught me who I am in Him. He taught me that not only do I need to have faith in Him, but I need to believe in myself again.

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.

The story of Christian reformation, revival, and renaissance underscores that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so we should always be people of hope and prayer, not gloom and defeatism. God the Holy Spirit can turn the situation around in five minutes.

I was emotionally and spiritually dried up, so I was just searching for God.

The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves - a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is the place of desperation, which is the place of faith, which is the place of freedom.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

I don't think it's any coincidence that I lost my religious faith and 'manned up' in the same year. I was described somewhere as a lapsed Catholic, which is funny because I'm not going back! I want to achieve things rather than live life in an animalistic way.

To him who, though by no means near the end, is yet advancing, He is the way; to him who has put off all that is dead He is the life.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

While in some countries there's a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India - in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God.

All the muddy waters of my life cleared up when I gave myself to Christ.

The question is what I wanted to do with the new life God has given me. This is the mission I want to take on.

What's different about the Gospel of Thomas is that, instead of focusing entirely on who Jesus is and the wonderful works of Jesus, it focuses on how you and I can find the kingdom of God, or life in the presence of God.

God wants to free us from ourselves, and there's nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.