Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Catherine of Siena, on Sin, ‘Always Produced Against the Neighbor’)

“See now, that, in all places and in all kinds of people, sin is always produced against the neighbor, and through his medium; in no other way could sin ever be committed either secret or open. A secret sin is when you deprive your neighbor of that which you ought to give him; an open sin is where you perform positive acts of sin, as I have related to you. It is, therefore, indeed the truth that every sin done against Me, is done through the medium of the neighbor."—Italian mystic and Doctor of the Church St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), The Dialogue of the Seraphic Virgin Catherine of Siena, translated by Algar Thorold (1370)

The image of St. Catherine of Siena that accompanies this post was created by Italian painter and printmaker Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770).

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Bedazzled,’ With Satan Confessing to a Long Losing Streak)

George Spiggott [aka Satan] [played by Peter Cook]: “There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas... I thought up the Seven Deadly Sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising.” —Bedazzled (1967), screenplay by Peter Cook, from a story by Dudley Moore, directed by Stanley Donen 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (J.R.R. Tolkien, on ‘An Eden on This Very Unhappy Earth’)

“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.”— English novelist and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter (1981)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Henry Ward Beecher, on What Many Think About Sunday)

“There are many people who think that Sunday is a sponge to wipe out all the sins of the week.” — U.S. abolitionist/minister Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), Life Thoughts: Gathered From the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher (1858)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Kathleen Norris, Redefining Sin)

“Like many Americans of my baby-boom generation, I had thought that religion was a constraint that I had overcome by dint of reason, learning, artistic creativity, sexual liberation. Church was for little kids or grandmas, a small-town phenomenon that one grew out of or left behind. It was a shock to realize that, to paraphrase Paul Simon, all the crap I learned in Sunday school was still alive and kicking inside me.  I was also astonished to discover how ignorant I was about my own religion.  Apart from a few Bible stories and hymns remembered from childhood I had little with which to start to build a mature faith.  I was still that child in The Snow Queen, asking, ‘What is sin?’ but not knowing how to find out.  Fortunately a Benedictine friend provided one answer: ‘Sin, in the New Testament,’ he told me, ‘is the failure to do concrete acts of love.’ That is something I can live with, a guide in my conversation.  It’s also a much better definition of sin than I learned as a child: sin as breaking rules.”— American poet, essayist and memoirist Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993)

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Pleasure, Sin—and Lots of Confusion)

“Man's a phenomenon, one knows not what,

         And wonderful beyond all wondrous measure;

    'Tis pity though, in this sublime world, that

         Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure;

    Few mortals know what end they would be at,

         But whether glory, power, or love, or treasure,

    The path is through perplexing ways, and when

    The goal is gain'd, we die, you know--and then----

    What then?--I do not know, no more do you--

         And so good night.”—English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan, Canto I (1819)

Quote of the Day (Richard Russo, on Sin)

“There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.” —American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs (2007)

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Why ‘Sin Wants to Remain Unknown’)

“Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of what is left unsaid sin poisons the whole being of a person.” — German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian in Community (1939)

Quote of the Day (St. James, on Those Who Boast of ‘Arrogant Schemes’)

“Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.  If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” —James 4:13-17

The image accompanying this post is St. James the Apostle (1516), by the German Northern Renaissance painter Albrecht Durer (1471-1528)

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, Praying Amid ‘The Sorry Confusion of Our World’)

“Lord, we pray this day mindful of the sorry confusion of our world. Look with mercy upon this generation of your children so steeped in misery of their own contriving, so far strayed from your ways and so blinded by passions. We pray for the victims of tyranny, that they may resist oppression with courage and may preserve their integrity by a hope which defies the terror of the moment. We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own hearts is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit. O God, who resists the proud and gives grace to the humble, bring down the mighty from their seats.”—American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Prayers,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics (Library of America edition, 2015)