Pause & Ponder // Reading in September

“If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation, in man’s inner growth… then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.”

Pope Benedict XVI – Wyatt North


“Certain realities take us beyond language because that is their very purpose. They do what words cannot do.”

“The God of the Incarnation is as much about kitchen tables as ecclesial altars.”

“In essence, what God is telling Adam and Eve is this: “I am going to give you life. You may receive that life, but you may never take it. To take it is to ruin and destroy the gift that it is”.”

“If our Eucharists do not succeed in breaking down the barriers that separate us from each other, then we have little reason to hope that these barriers will break down in our world.”

Our One Great Act of Fidelity – Ronald Rolheiser


“Stegner argued that a wild place was worth much more than could ever be revealed by a cost-benefit analysis of its recreational economic value, or its minerals and resources. No, he explained, we need wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human. Forests, plains, prairies, deserts, mountains: the experience of those landscapes can give people ‘a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost’.”

“Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed – incidentally, deliberately – imagination and memory go with them.”

“It is difficult, even now, to travel through the clearer glens of Scotland and miss the evidence of earlier calamity. Difficult, too, not to be disturbed by it, not to find one’s own relationship with the land changed by the knowledge of what once occurred here. The pasts of these places complicate and darken their present wildness; caution against romanticism and blitheness.”

The Wild Places – Robert Macfarlane