Whose woods these are I think I know, His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here, To watch his woods fill up with snow. …

For the past sixteen years I’ve lived in a small town eleven miles west of Boston. For the first thirteen of those years I commuted into Boston five or six days a week, worked long hours, and knew the roads that led in and out of Boston better than I knew my neighbors. …

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted. Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that.

As I began reading Sallie McFague’s The Body of God the image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man captured my imagination. It was amazing to me how quickly I could accurately visualize da Vinci’s drawing when I read McFague’s reference, “The classic organic model is expressed in the phrase ‘the church as the body of Christ’ and pictured in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a male figure with arms and legs outstretched to the four corners of the cosmos.” By the time I finished reading the section, “The Classic Organic Model,” my mind was swirling with different interpretations of his image. …

Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision. It is easier blindly to venerate the saints than to learn that human quality of their sainthood. …

Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society is considered to be a classic in the Christian Ethics field. Written more than seventy years ago in 1932, Niebuhr’s message is so timeless much of it could have been written yesterday. His insights regarding over-consumption, unbridled self-determinism, and our unstable technological civilization seem particularly insightful and poignant for anyone engaged in the environmental movement today.