Joshua Sisco

“How do you honor and channel blind desire in a child? By accepting that energy for what it is, the deep principle of life made manifest. Accordingly, we should never shame it: “You are a pig!” “You are selfish!” The child should never be made to feel dirty and guilty for having this energy. Instead the child should be initiated into its fuller meaning by connecting this desire to the heart of life itself within the family.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Fire Within: Desire, Sexuality, Longing, and God

“This substantial healing engages the four basic spheres of reality—God, people, place, and self. Schaeffer observes: “First of all, man is separated from God; second, he is separated from himself (thus the psychological problems of life); third, he is separated from other men (thus the sociological problems of life); fourth, he is separated from nature (thus the problems of living in this world—for example, the ecological problems). All these need healing.”4”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“The church in which I grew up, that very particular expression of ecclesiology, is dead—as is everything else from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. But the church is not dead. It is very much alive, bursting with life in many ways. However, it is alive with the life of today, the life that we are actually living at the turn of the millennium, and not with the life of the 1950s.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

“We use the word fall only because something once stood. We use the word ruin only because something good and beautiful once existed. These broken but remaining reflections of God’s image in persons are what Edith Schaeffer called our “leftover beauty.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture