History matters. It matters whether we tell the truth about what happened centuries ago, and it matters whether we tell the truth about more recent history. It matters because if we can't we will never be able to face the present, guaranteeing that our future will be doomed.
the word 'justification' has itself had a chequered career over the course of many centuries of debate. As the major historian of the doctrine has noted, the word has long since ceased to mean, in ecclesial debates, what it meant for Paul himself - which is confusing, since the debates have gone on referring to Paul as though he was in fact talking about what they want to talk about. It is as though the greengrocer treated you to a long discussion of how onions are grown, and how best to cook with them, when what you had asked was how much he would charge for three of them.
Mothers have not always had the most important role in their children's upbringing, when they had other economic roles to play. Inpast centuries, fathers were the key parent in the upbringing of the next generation, because moral training, not emotional sensitivity, was thought to be central to successful child-rearing. Mothers were thought to corrupt their little ones with too much affection and not enough stern training.
The same Being that fashioned the insect whose existence is only discerned by a microscope, and gave that invisible speck a system of ducts and other organs to perform its vital functions, created the enormous mass of the planet thirteen hundred times larger than our earth, and launched it in its course round the sun, and the comet, wheeling with a velocity that would carry it round our globe in less than two minutes of time, and yet revolving through so prodigious a space that it takes near six centuries to encircle the sun!
Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.
The political structure in different countries has different origins, different developments. Something which suits one country extremely well would perhaps fail completely in another. Germany, through the long centuries of monarchy, has always had a leadership principle. . . . The position of the Catholic Church rests now, as before, on the clear leadership principle of its hierarchy. And I think I can also say that of Russia, too.
I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.
It is unfortunate that we should find ourselves at this time the only disorganized group. Others have had the advantage of organization for centuries, so what seems to them unnecessary, from a racial point of view, becomes necessary to us, who have had to labor all along under the disadvantage of being scattered without a racial aim or purpose.
The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.
Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.
I got myself into a lovely little shall we say controversy with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.
When I look like this into the blue sky, it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awe-inspiring loving-kindness.
Vision is perhaps our greatest strength. . it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.
A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.
For centuries, man believed that the sun revolves around the earth. Centuries later, he still thinks that time moves clockwise.
When you approach the tabernacle remember that he has been waiting for you for twenty centuries.
Milliseconds influence centuries.
The Soul which is approaching its' liberation, as it looks back over past lives. . . down the vistas of the centuries along which it has slowly been climbing,. . . is able to see there the way in which the bonds were made, the causes which set it in motion. It is able to see how many of those causes have worked themselves out and. . . how many. . . are still working themselves out.
Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.
Truth takes no account of centuries.
