‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
Alles ist anders. Alles ist neu. Alles ist schön.
(Everything is different. Everything is new. Everything is beautiful.)
This quote is ascribed to Le Corbusier in Peter Stamm, Sieben Jahre. I have no idea in what kind of context Le Corbusier might have said this, but it is a pretty good description of the effects of spiritual transformation.
Learning to live out of control, learning to live without trying to force contingency into conformity because of our desperate need for security, I take to be a resource for discovering alternatives that would otherwise not be present.
Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir
I don’t think that violence is Christian. … the very essence of Christianity is the cross. It is through the cross that we will change.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
Faith in God means believing that anyone can be transformed, regardless of the past.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
There is … no other way to God for our time but through the enemy, for loving the enemy has become the key both to human survival in the age of terror and to personal transformation.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
Even if nonviolent action does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor, it does affect those committed to it. As Martin Luther King Jr. attested, it gives them new self-respect and calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had.
Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
Karl Möller 