bible and theology on Nostalgia

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

Beware of harking back to what you once were when God wants you to be something you have never been.

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

Truth be told, whether we realize it or not, we all harbor romantic notions of aristocracy. Though we claim equality as a cultural value, there is a part of us that dreams of leisure, luxury, comfort,...

When did the topic of justice become important to you?” Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us wer...

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

On a trip to France during college, I (Cyd) was walking through a historic garden in Paris with my older sister. Rounding one of the reflecting pools, we both caught a familiar scent and stopped dead ...

“I remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, I don’t really remember yesterday all that well.”

Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.

When we remember the past, it is not only the past; it breaks into the present and gains a new lease on life.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

There is a deep longing in every human heart to return to our ancestral home. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sing about this in their song “Woodstock”: “We got to get ourselves back to the garden.” T...

"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was."

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

As an amateur yet serious student of the American Civil War, I am constantly amazed at the sheer volume of material, which was preserved orally for half a century and longer, surrounding the key figur...

Nothing cures ingratitude as quickly as a good memory.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between the past, present, and future ultimately meaningless: to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that s...

Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.

In her excellent little book (Mythical Me), Richella Parham describes the importance of looking on the past with grace: Developing a redemptive memory requires recalling not only the pain of the pas...

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

What we . . . refer to confidently as memory . . . is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

It is not new truths we need; we need old truths recently forgotten.

Two-thirds of the story of redemption is known to Christians as the Old Testament. Yet in the decades that I have been teaching Bible, I have found that most Christians, if allowed to answer honestly,...