Jay Parini Quotes
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Jesus remains the most influential person in history, one who has inspired untold followers for millennia.
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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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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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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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One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.
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I regard Jesus, like the Buddha, as a figure with the power to shape our lives.
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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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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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Honest, simple work for young people is essential to their well-being.
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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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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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In a sense, I wrote the book about Jesus that I wanted to read.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The stories about the life and teachings of Jesus were mainly told in Greek, the original language of the gospels.
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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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For the most part, I think of PC as meaning Plain Civil. You treat people the way you'd like to be treated yourself, and that means not using language that is demeaning.
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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 whole Christmas story was probably a later addition to the gospel narratives, presented only by the authors of Matthew and Luke. Mark and John seem never to have heard of the manger in Bethlehem, the Massacre of the Innocents, the hovering star, the three wise men, and so forth.