Jay Parini Quotes
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The United States is truly remarkable, a nation founded on a set of Enlightenment ideals so beautifully expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution. We should feel good about our ideals, even when we don't quite manage to live up to them.
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The idea that owning a gun in America was an individual right only dates to the 1980s.
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Each year in early spring, during the season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter, a plenitude of books, magazine articles, and television shows about Jesus appear.
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I regard Jesus, like the Buddha, as a figure with the power to shape our lives.
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My earliest memories of holidays are from when I was about eight. We lived in Pennsylvania, and every year we'd visit Miami.
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Fundamentalism takes different forms in different religions, but there is one striking similarity in all forms of fundamentalist thought. Each wishes dearly to hold in check all varieties of 'modern' or 'decadent' thinking.
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Good and productive labor is valuable, and it doesn't mean you have to have a fancy job description. You don't have to become rich. You can be ordinary. Happiness lies there. Do good work, create good work for others.
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One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.
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American politicians who dwell on American exceptionalism only dishonor us by suggesting we play dumb to our past.
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There's been an unquestionable decline in American culture. The education system is thin on the ground. People don't read as deeply and at length as they used to. And the media has been scattered into so many cable channels.
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We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens.
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I've been teaching full-time for 41 years at small colleges, and I can't imagine what it would mean for me or my colleagues to be armed with handguns or rifles instead of books and a thorough knowledge of our chosen disciplines.
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My father was a Baptist preacher, and he used to read the King James Bible to me every single morning. He made me memorize it and repeat verses at night before I went to sleep.
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The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.
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I have a mystical bent, and I pursue daily meditations that follow the liturgical calendar - what are called the 'daily offices' of the church.
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In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are many Aramaic texts from the time of Jesus, so one can get a pretty good idea of what the language of Jesus looked liked.
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Honest, simple work for young people is essential to their well-being.
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A proper respect for nature means that you can't pollute the air, poison the rivers and chop down the forests indiscriminately without suffering greatly.
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Christmas is, for those who wish to follow the way of Jesus, an invitation to accept into our comfortable and safe lives those who come to us from far away, who seem ragged, marginal, in transition.
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I've spent a good deal of time in the Middle East over the years, lecturing at universities in places like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco.
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It's impossible to see the face of Jesus without seeking that face in some concentrated way, in the practice of the faith, through prayer and action.
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When you think about 'The Grapes of Wrath,' it's an American masterpiece, and a very long process goes into the making of such a book.
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The stories about the life and teachings of Jesus were mainly told in Greek, the original language of the gospels.
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God is God, but he has various names in different languages, and each strand of monotheistic religion has multiple ways of describing the godhead.