7 Quotes by Norman Wirzba

According to Scripture, the world we live in is God’s creation. It is the visual, fragrant, audible, touchable, and tastable manifestation of God’s love, the place where God’s desire that others be and be well finds earthly expression.

Food is a gift of God given to all creatures for the purposes of life’s nurture, sharing, and celebration. When it is done in the name of God, eating is the earthly realization of God’s eternal communion-building love.

Idols evoke worship in us because we think they can save us from life’s contingencies, mysteries, and finitude. Put another way, we make idols of all sorts of things – the stock market, a job, superstar athletes and performers, our families – because we think that by giving our allegiance to them we will make our lives secure and complete.

Fasting, in its most fundamental aspiration, is about developing a sacrificial, self-offering life that addresses and nurtures the needs of others.

We don’t know if soil is an organism or a matrix or what-the-heck-is-this-thing, and yet when we put seed into it, it can support life.

Thanksgiving is the power that transforms desire and satisfaction, love and possession, into life, that fulfills everything in the world, given to us by God, into knowledge of God and communion with him.2.

Whenever we make an idol of anything, we presuppose that it has the power to give life. We confuse something given by God as a means of life with its being the source and fulfillment of life. False worship is so dangerous because it witnesses to human attention and energy being directed in ways that are bound to lead to mutual harm.