The Search For Common Ground : An Inquiry Into The Basis Of Man's Experience Of Community (1971), p. 6
Context: In the conflicts between man and man, between group and group, between nation and nation, the loneliness of the seeker for community is sometimes unendurable. The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste. Always he must know that the contradictions of life are not final or ultimate; he must distinguish between failure and a many-sided awareness so that he will not mistake conformity for harmony, uniformity for synthesis. He will know that for all men to be alike is the death of life in man, and yet perceive harmony that transcends all diversities and in which diversity finds its richness and significance.
“Uniformity is the death of life. Wherever there is life, there is diversity.”
Kunnumpuram, K. (2009) Towards the Fullness of Life: Reflections on the Daily Living of the Faith. Mumbai: St Pauls
On the Church
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Kurien Kunnumpuram 33
Indian theologian 1931–2018Related quotes
“The purpose of those who argue for cultural diversity is to impose ideological uniformity.”
“An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation.”
Source: The God of the Machine (1943), p. 30
“In sociology, just as in biology, uniformity and immobility are death.”
“L'ora del nazionalismo” (“Nationalism's hour”), 1919 essay in Alfredo Rocco’s Scritti e discorsi politici, Milan: Giuffrè. Vol. 2, (1938) p. 510
“There is no death without life. Therefore, death depends entirely on life.”
1910s, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)