When prayer fades out, power fades out. We are as spiritual as we are prayerful; no more, no less.
E. Stanley JonesRead
An individual gospel without a social gospel is a soul without a body and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost, the other a corpse.
Interpretation
Both individual and social aspects of faith are essential for a complete spiritual life.
E. Stanley Jones highlights the interdependence between personal faith and social responsibility, suggesting that true spirituality requires both an inner conviction and outward action. A faith that neglects social justice is incomplete, just as a focus solely on social issues without personal integrity lacks true life and purpose.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the importance of social justice and personal faith.
When prayer fades out, power fades out. We are as spiritual as we are prayerful; no more, no less.
The purpose of religion is not so much to get us into heaven, or to keep us out of hell, but to put a little bit of heaven into us, and take the hell out of us. This has always been the greatest responsibility of religion.
A Johns Hopkins doctor says that 'we do not know why it is that the worriers die sooner than the non-worriers, but that is a fact.' But I, who am simple of mind, think I know we are inwardly constructed, in nerve and tissue and brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. Therefore, the need of faith is not something imposed on us dogmatically, but it is written in us intrinsically. We cannot live without it. To live by worry is to live against Reality.
Worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil.
To implant fear in the minds of children is a crime. If parents try to rule the child by fear, then fear rules the child.
Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of idealogy [sic], that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art etc.
I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.
To the soul that knows its own divinity, all else must gravitate
Ever building, building to the clouds, still building higher, and never reflecting that the poor narrow basis cannot sustain the giddy tottering column.
Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.
There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
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