When I see people very diligently trying to discover what kind of prayer they are experiencing and so completely wrapt up in their prayers that they seem afraid to stir, or to indulge in a moment’s thought, lest they should lose the slightest degree of the tenderness and devotion which they have been feeling,
Born a Lithuanian Jew, Shereschewsky studied to become a rabbi. While pursuing graduate work in Germany, however, he became interested in Christianity through missionaries of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, a voluntary ecumenical group. In 1854 he emigrated to the United States,
In recent years, I have come to believe that anyone who wishes to understand Israel’s Scripture deeply would do well to learn more about the ecological crisis, and especially about its agricultural dimensions. At the same time, Jews and Christians who wish to understand the depth of the crisis would do well to ponder it in light of Israel’s Scripture.
The doctrine of the Trinity is a koan which represents the faith that God creates all things, reconciles all things, and redeems all things, the faith that the being and end of all things is encountered in the bringing of order out of chaos, in the reconciliation of persons and communities, and in the hope that God’s glory will finally irradiate all things. Because that is the case, it follows that everything that we do as Christians, including our politics and our fashioning of the world, should be shaped by that hope.
We are made to love, both to satisfy the necessity of our active nature and to answer the beauties in every creature. By love our souls are married and soldered to the creatures, and it is our duty like God to be united to them all.
All the careful worship through which the Church leads her children to the Altar, all the emotion into which, cleansed and fed, they return, is saturate with social earnestness. But the Sacrament is greater than the worship which enshrines it; and meditation on the Holy Mystery Itself gives best guidance to our minds.
No one can write his real religious life with pen or pencil. It is written only in actions, and its seal is our character, not our orthodoxy. Whether we, our neighbour, or God is the judge, absolutely the only value of our “religious” life to ourselves or to any one is what it fits us for and enables us to do.
Every true disciple of Jesus Christ gives an affirmative to the question which Cain raised only in denial: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Socialism, as Christians view it, is only a consistent carrying out of this principle as far as necessary, viz., that each man is his brother’s keeper. We say, only as far as necessary.
From Henry Melchior Muhlenberg’s theological orientation and his realization that adaptation to a new American environment was essential if Lutheranism was ever to become a true ecclesia plantata emerged his ecclesiastical polity.
Doubtless, like as all nations in the diversity of speeches may know one God in the unity of faith, and be one in love; even so may divers translations understand one another, and that in the head articles and ground of our most blessed faith, though they use sundry words.