According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another.
For a modern ruler the laws of conservation and transformation of energy, when the vivifing stream takes its source, the ways it wends its course in nature, and how, under wisdom and knowledge, it may be intertwined with human destiny, instead of careering headlong to the ocean, are a study at least as pregnant with consequences to life as any lesson taught by the long unscientific history of man.
That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age.
For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast.
God's kingdom is launched through Jesus and particularly through his death and resurrection; but, by the Spirit, this kingdom is not an escape from the present world but rather its transformation, already in the present (starting with Jesus' resurrection) and in the ultimate future (the new heaven and earth including our own resurrection).
Paleontologists ever since Darwin have been searching (largely in vain) for the sequences of insensibly graded series of fossils that would stand as examples of the sort of wholesale transformation of species that Darwin envisioned as the natural product of the evolutionary process. Few saw any reason to demur - though it is a startling fact that. . . most species remain recognizably themselves, virtually unchanged throughout their occurrence in geological sediments of various ages.
The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment.
A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.
Our attempts to reshape others may produce change, but the change is distortion rather than transformation.
The Bible was written not to satisfy your curiosity but to help you conform to Christ's image. Not to make you a smarter sinner but to make you like the Saviour. Not to fill your head with a collection of biblicalfacts but to transform your life.
Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it.
Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.
I delighted in the music of Africa, the earliest of the slave plantation songs, the transformation into Christianity and all that Christianity brought to the lives of the Africans who were forced to come to America.
I think of dance as a constant transformation of life itself.
I believe inner beauty is beauty in its truest form. When we nurture ourselves, it brings an inevitable, positive transformation.
The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.
Once innocence--an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.
Know that transformation sometimes begins with a fall. So never curse the fall.
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.