engagement

Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.

If you imagine that I have the smallest desire to receive your hand as a reward for having performed a difficult task to your satisfaction you're beside the bridge, my child! I've no fancy for a reluctant wife. I want your love, not your gratitude.

I married a man who was as much a part of me as my own soul.

Humans pursuing deep, complete connections respond to quite different incentives from those that influence self-interested utility maximizers. Rewards, monitoring, and punishments are less likely to be effective than engagement, communication, norms, socialization, identity, and common purpose. They share not out of a calculation of reciprocity but from a psychological pleasure in sharing. Those seeking connections make decisions from their hearts as well as their heads, influenced by emotion, fairness, empathy, and intuition. Their behavior, thoughts, feelings, and even personal attributes are highly socially contingent. The range of humanity includes individuals who display every possible combination of selfishness and sociability.

By 1833 the largest publisher in America, Harper and Company, boasted one horse-powered printing press and seven hand presses while the American Bible Society owned 16 new state-of-the-art, steam-driven presses and 20 hand presses.

If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work.

While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic.

Strictly speaking, there__ no such thing as a __hristian_ movie because movies, though often remarkable pieces of art full of symbolism, commentary and meaning, are not sentient beings. Even the animated ones are, strictly speaking, still things, inanimate objects lacking eternal souls, incapable of feeling emotions or making decisions.

We are called to go make disciples, but how do disciples live? How do we function in the world__n our marriages, families, schools and places of business? How do we live as salt and light in the society?

Good art requires the examination of faith issues from a variety of perspectives and voices. Yet for many audience members, the only way a film can be __hristian_ is if there is a major altar-call type scene with a dramatic conversion. If the movie isn__ an overt endorsement not only of faith itself but Judeo-Christian morality and/or Protestant culture, then it__ not __hristian.

Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly.

Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German.

Why is it that all the Christians I see on TV shows and movies are nothing like the Christians I know in actual life? The people I know have a sense of humor, aren't shallow, don't feel like they know all the answers, struggle, get scared, have hope, make sense, make peace, and hang on tight to their values because they're worth hanging on to. Have Hollywood writers just never actually set foot in a church???

Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake _ you invade a country without understanding its music. _ Norman Mailer