Words matter. These are the best Jay Parini Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I still have deep respect for the evangelical tradition and feel, in many ways, close to the Baptist roots of my childhood, although I’ve been an Episcopalian throughout my adult life and a regular churchgoer.
Within the Christian tradition, fundamentalism arose in the 19th century as an effort to push back against modern’ readings of the Bible that suggested everything in the text wasn’t true in some literal sense.
I have a mystical bent, and I pursue daily meditations that follow the liturgical calendar – what are called the ‘daily offices’ of the church.
The fact is, we need markers in life, whether we subscribe to a religion or not. And the major holidays, such as Christmas, serve to remind us of the turning world.
I regard Jesus, like the Buddha, as a figure with the power to shape our lives.
I say that a myth is a story which has particular energy, mythic resonance. I always say that a myth is a tear in the fabric of reality through which all of this spiritual energy pours.
I’m tired of hearing about this ‘well-regulated militia’ that is so necessary for American freedom.
For no good reason, George W. Bush and the best and brightest he could muster, including the likes of Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz, decided it made sense to attack Iraq.
I have written about some truly great writers – John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
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.
I have always found the baptism of Jesus, with a dove descending and voice from Heaven, one of the great moments in the Jesus story. This is where Jesus hears the deep call from God.
Then I studied theology in college, and when I was getting a Ph.D. in literature, I took courses in New Testament studies and studied Greek versions of the Gospels.
I envy Muslims their practice of regular and genuine prayer. It’s a beautiful practice that enriches their daily lives.
So who is Jesus? For me, he’s the central character in the greatest story ever told. It’s a story about a gradually realizing kingdom that lies inside of us.
Beginning in the late 18th century, some German scholars began to regard Holy Scripture not as a single revelation but a sequence of inspired texts that occurred in specific times and places and were subject to varied and multiple meanings.
One thing a narcissist doesn’t like is to look in a mirror that is in any way genuinely reflective of what’s on the other side of it.
I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.
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.
Whether we’re looking at the burial box of St. James, a fragment of the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, or some bones supposedly belonging to John the Baptist, there is always excitement and distrust, faith and doubt.
As ‘Possession’ progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges.
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.
God is God, but he has various names in different languages, and each strand of monotheistic religion has multiple ways of describing the godhead.
In truth, Jesus did not, in his own time, attract much notice.
American fundamentalist thought connected strongly to reactionary political ideology as nervous Christians pushed back against liberal reforms on many fronts.
I had a year off, so my wife and I were heading to Italy to study Italian. We found a little house in a village called Atrani. I discovered that Gore Vidal lived right above us in a big house, so I sent him a note.
Although the story of George and Lennie in ‘Of Mice and Men’ ends on a depressing note, there is a peculiar aura of human dignity in it, a hint of redemption.
It’s time that Americans dealt seriously with guns, getting in place strong and appropriate measures – there is no excuse for anything but the strictest controls.
The idea that owning a gun in America was an individual right only dates to the 1980s.
The core of the Jesus message is what has made him relevant for twenty centuries.
If you think about it, Jesus was this religious genius who grows up on the Silk Road, and so He’s getting from the West all these Greek ideas from Plato about body and soul.
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.
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.
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.
My own grandparents came to the United States as immigrants in 1912, and they lived for some years in Italian ghettos in New York. Most immigrant groups start in ghettos somewhere, and many of them never get out.
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.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were comfortable with any number of deities and were quite open to allowing conquered nations to continue to worship in whatever ways they saw fit, as long as they didn’t mind having an emperor who required taxes and tributes.
Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn’t have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.
As a Christian, I try to meditate or pray at least once a day, however briefly.
A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because ‘Possession’ is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.
I suspect that a huge amount of the anxiety and suffering that we see around can be closely traced to our wanton misuse of our resources. Just look at any garbage dump and see what is wasted. In a sense, we’ve wasted our souls.
I think that the practice of religion allows one to discover emotional and psychological truth of a kind not available in the secular world.
Even among those who have no special allegiance to a particular branch of Christianity, there are plenty of seekers as well as agnostics and atheists who harbor a certain curiosity about Jesus and his story.
Ridding the world of poverty is, of course, a fantasy.
‘Bag of Bones’ was a big, distorted yet wonderfully entertaining novel that rode high on the bestseller lists in 1998.
With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody’s electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.
It’s probably incorrect to say that Islam is ‘a religion of peace,’ as some politicians like to say. Overstatements like that don’t clarify anything.
The most dazzling aspect of ‘Possession’ is Ms. Byatt’s canny invention of letters, poems and diaries from the 19th century.
I suspect that the framers of the Bill of Rights have long since rolled over in their graves.
What I’m trying to argue, as passionately as I can, is that the Jesus story isn’t worth dying for, it’s worth living for. Jesus presents a third way, a way of being in the worth that embraces the Sermon on the Mount, with its challenge to violence and greed.
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.
Jesus discouraged the accumulation of wealth, worried about its effects on those who had it, and took special pleasure in helping the poor, dedicating his efforts to them. He must have shaken his head at the large gaps between rich and poor throughout ancient Palestine in the first century.
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.
The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it’s connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.
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.
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.