Sources
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The Christian view of vocation sees everything that the notion of destiny does. It affirms the specialness and uniqueness of each of us. It calls us to excellence and occasionally to self-sacrifice requiring extraordinary courage and commitment. To be in vocation calls us to stringent discipline and to certain kinds of asceticism. But in all these affirmations and callings to a strenuous investment of self, the fundamental motives and the strategie of vocation are different from those of the strategies of the realization of one's destiny. In the latter--the pursuit of one's destiny--self-fulfillment and the work of self-actualization constitute the prime reason for living and the goal of all striving. The strategy of fulfillment calls for a direct assault upon the citadel of 'goodness'. It means maximizing one's accumulation of those qualities and goods that promise to guarantee one's fullness and completion. And, paradoxically....this very strategy of pursuit alienates us from the bonds of community and intimacy, and from commitments to causes whose worth transcends our own, upon which true fulfillment depends.James Fowler, Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian (Harper & Row, 1984), 102.

If city planning’s constituency is to be, at least in part, those groups who are most vulnerable, whether from economic or political disadvantage…then new forms of planning will be increasingly important. ..We need a broader and more politicized definition of planning’s domain and practice….If city life is a “being together of strangers” we need to create public spaces that encourage . . . encounters. But the opposite is happening. Planners are systematically demolishing such space in the name of the flip side of desire—fear. Leonie Sandercock, Toward Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 204, 210.

Foremost for churches in racially transitional communities is a change of attitude. They have lived for too long in a fearful and desperate struggle for survival. Churches in racially transitional communities must live in a sense of faith and hope—not despair and pessimism—as the cornerstones of the Christian church. The past does not have to completely determine the future. New patterns are emerging; new strategies must be discovered. James Davis and Woodie White, Racial Transition in the Church (Abingdon, 1980), 137.