The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. ~Antonio Gramsci

"The history of the failure of war can almost be summed up in two words: too late.

* Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy.
* Too late in realizing the mortal danger.
* Too late in preparedness.
* Too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance.
* Too late in standing with one's friends."

- General Douglas Macarthur

Colorado Springs cop – Pastor’s final serom: Time is short

A s he began his last sermon, Hope Chapel co-pastor Garrett Swasey told newcomers that if they wanted to understand his point of view, they needed to know that he was also a police officer in Colorado Springs.

Thus, he was used to being surrounded by lots of distractions while trying to focus on life-and-death issues – like spotting threats to public safety. In this multitasking age, he said, it’s easy to let the clutter of daily life hide what really matters.

“I have been quoted on a number of occasions, and I never seem to get quoted on the things that I would like to be quoted on, and I’m quoted on the things that I don’t really prefer to be quoted on,” said the 44-yearold Swasey, one of several ordained elders at this small evangelical congregation.

“One of those things – you’ve all heard me say this before – is, ‘Give me three seconds and I’ll forget the Gospel.’ Right? It’s like I have some kind of spiritual ADD.”

The congregation laughed as Swasey led them on a witty tour of his own mind, where serious thoughts about sin and forgiveness – “Focus on the Gospel, focus on the Gospel, focus on the Gospel” – crash into, “How the heck did Denver lose to Indy?” or visions from Three Stooges movies or nagging concerns about a superstar quarterback in New England improperly deflating footballs.

It’s hard to focus on the eternal, he stressed, again and again. But it’s crucial to try, because the clock is running and no one knows how much time they have left.

Two weeks later, the congregation gathered in mourning after Swasey – on duty at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs – was killed after he voluntarily responded to calls for help at the nearby Planned Parenthood facility.

“His greatest joys were his family, his church and his profession,” said his wife, Rachel, in a statement read at the service. “We will cherish his memory, especially those times he spent tossing the football to his son and snuggling with his daughter on the couch. ...

“Helping others brought him deep satisfaction, and being a police officer was a part of him. In the end, his last act was for the safety and well-being of others and was a tribute to his life. What we need most today ... is your prayers for our family and for others who were impacted by this tragedy.” Swasey’s last sermon was already online, as part of the church’s podcast ministry. His 45-minute take on St. Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, chapter three, began drawing attention after portions were transcribed and posted at TheCripplegate.com, a website taking its name from a London landmark crucial to early Protestants.

“I was in tears several times as I transcribed that,” said Jordan Standridge of Immanuel Bible Church in Springfield, Virginia. “He was preaching to a small church, but now his message – his actions and his appeal to the Gospel – will be heard by so many people, all over.”

It was, of course, symbolic that Swasey died protecting people at a controversial location – Planned Parenthood – in a city internationally known as a center for evangelical churches and ministry. Hope Chapel’s own doctrinal statements affirm marriage as the “uniting of one man and one woman in a covenant commitment for a lifetime” and that “children, from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord.”

Swasey, stressed Standridge, was opposed to abortion, but “he was really pro-life. He died a hero, not a hypocrite. He laid down his life to protect people– period. ... Who knows how God will use his sacrifice?”

At the end of his sermon, Swasey poignantly – in hindsight – returned to his theme that many modern people are distracted and, thus, often delay making choices and changes in their lives, thinking they have more time. They hear God calling them to do something, but don’t act.

“If you hear His voice, do it today,” he said. “Not tomorrow. Not, ‘let me sleep on it.’ Today! Before it is too late. ... Do not harden your hearts.”

Paraphrasing Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Swasey concluded, “The history of failure can be summed up in two words: ‘too late.’”

—Terry Mattingly is the editor of GetReligion.org and Senior Fellow for Media and Religion at The King’s College in New York City. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” - Chesterton

“The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”  ― Martin Luther

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore-on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him "meek and mild," and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. ~ Dorothy Sayers

"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid. For to occupy every spare moment in reading, and to do nothing but read, is even more paralyzing to the mind than constant manual labor, which at least allows those engaged in it to follow their own thoughts. A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity; and so does the mind if other people’s thoughts are constantly forced upon it. Just as you can ruin the stomach and impair the whole body by taking too much nourishment, so you can overfill and choke the mind by feeding it too much. The more you read, the fewer are the traces left by what you have read: the mind becomes like a tablet crossed over and over with writing. There is no time for ruminating, and in no other way can you assimilate what you have read. If you read on and on without setting your own thoughts to work, what you have read can not strike root, and is generally lost."

Arthur Shopenhaur

For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in 
front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you. 

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. 

But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

https://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-speech-1-1-90_0c7cd97e58.pdf

Vaclav Havel

"Most people spend nearly all their energy trying not to change. This is what the philosopher William James meant when he wrote the mind’s main function was to be a fortress for protecting your ego from reality. When the mind has to accommodate a new fact, James argued, it doesn’t settle on the change to its model of reality that is most likely to reflect reality. It protects the fortress, calculating the smallest possible modification to its bulwarks that can account for the new fact." - Glenn Kelman http://www.standfirminfaith.com/?/sf/page/30480

"We realize more clearly than formerly that the world lies under the wrath and grace of God. We read in Jeremiah 45, 'Thus says the Lord: Behold, what I have built I am breaking down, and what I have planted I am plucking up....And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not; for behold, I am bringing evil upon all flesh...but I will give your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.' If we can save our souls unscathed out of the wreckage of our material possessions, let us be satisfied with that. If the Creator destroys the Divine handiwork, what right have we to lament the destruction of ours? It will be the task of our generation, not to 'seek great things,' but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a 'prize' from the burning building."  Bonhoeffer - Letters and Papers from Prison 157-158

From Maximos the Confessor.
“The three young men condemned no one, when they refused to adore the statue everyone else worshipped, … nor did Daniel condemn anyone, when he was thrown into the lions’ den—he simply preferred to die rather than offend God.”

Wendell Berry, re: modern sex education in the schools: “What we are actually teaching the young is an illusion of...purchasable safety, which encourages them to tamper prematurely, disrespectfully, and dangerously with a great power.”

"[Christian] education needs impact the aesthetics of human understanding. It needs to get hold of our gut and capture our imagination—that preconscious, emotional register on which we perceive the world and that, in turn, drives or ‘pulls’ our action… If the practices of Christian formation are truly going to reform our manners and deflect our dispositions to be aimed at the kingdom of God, then such practices need to engender rightly ordered erotic comprehension by renewing and reorienting our imaginations." - James K. A. Smith. from Desiring the Kingdom

Twice in the past few weeks, I’ve heard people who identify as Christians say, in all sincerity, that they didn’t see why anybody needs to go to church, that they can “find God” on their own. I hear some version of that a good bit. With that comes an entire worldview. It’s the complete liberation of the individual from any authority other than his or her own conscience and judgment. Outside an authoritative interpretive community in which one anchors one’s own understanding, the search for God really becomes a search for oneself, and the deification of one’s own attitudes and desires." - Rod Dreher, from “The Past as Bathwater”

"Well, they were hoping to have someone show them the big picture and expecting it to be a mirror. They were a little disappointed to find they weren't even in the picture, not even in the background."

“Done is better than prefect.” - a corporate motto near you

“Perfect never gets done.” - a seminary professor near you, in response

“Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.” - Lao Tzu

"...The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live." - G.K. Chesterton

From a 1909 G. K. Chesterton essay: "Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous than the exultation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made essential and godliness is regarded as an offence."

“Dominus noster Christus veritatem se, non consuetudinem cognominavit.” – “Christ our Lord called himself truth, not custom.” - Tertullian

Re: the syncretism of outdoor Christmas decor (too) near you: "I don't think Jesus likes being that close to penguins on a carousel!"

"Robinson Crusoe on his island is hardly a type of the human soul. We are too individualistic—too apt to forget that Robinson Crusoe had an axe and a number of other fascinating things brought from England, all of which implied humanity, and the long history of civilization. He had also a Bible in English, we may remember, which again implied a long history of religion. The individual inherits all this—he is made by it; it is in him; and sound thinking requires the recognition of this fact also, as well as all other relevant facts, in the fulness of its meaning. Without the religious history of the race behind us, not one of us is likely to achieve anything, either in his own religious life or in his thinking. If he starts afresh, he is most like an artist who begins without perspective, and ignores all that has been learned and felt of color." - T. R. Glover

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." – Mark Twain

“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I ever met.” - Abraham Lincoln, re: a fellow lawyer

"IF YOU READ HISTORY YOU WILL FIND THAT THE CHRISTIANS WHO DID MOST FOR THE PRESENT WORLD WERE PRECISELY THOSE WHO THOUGHT MOST OF THE NEXT." - C.S. LEWIS

The United States has now acquired an electorally powerful liberal bourgeoisie who are convinced, as their European counterparts have been for several generations, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that public spending is inherently virtuous, that poverty can be cured by penalising wealth creation, and that government intervention can engineer social "fairness."  But just when some of Europe's political class has begun to appreciate the dangers of this philosophy - that taken to its logical conclusion, it leads to economic stagnation and social division - America seems to have decided that it is the quintessence of enlightened sophistication. - columnist Janet Daley writing in the London Telegraph, 11Nov12, as reported in the Wall Street Journal

There's a long tradition in the Christian life, most developed in Eastern Orthodoxy, of honoring beauty as a witness to God and a call to prayer. Beauty is never only what our senses report to us but always also a sign of what's just beyond our senses—an innerness and depth. There's more to beauty than we can account for empirically. In that more and beyond, we discern God." - Eugene Peterson, Leap over a Wall

There are those who will quote the Bible out of context to try to shame you for quoting the Bible IN context. - James Elliot

Those least familiar with the bible least are those most likely to say that you can "prove anything" from it. - Matt Kennedy

“Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to manuever you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop." - C.S. Lewis

"He taught me on that trip how to navigate by the sun and the stars with a sextant. As I look back, it seems to me one of the most fundamental skills a father can teach a son: finding out where you are, using the tools of your ancestors." - Christopher Buckley, re: his father

"If children are hardwired to connect, and if the current ecology of childhood is leading to a weakening of connectedness and therefore to growing numbers of suffering children, building and renewing authoritative communities is arguably the greatest imperative that we face as a society." - per the Commission on Children at Risk, Hardwired to Connect

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” - Richard Niebuhr, from The Kingdom of God in America, 1937, re: Protestant liberalism

“In order to write about life, first you must live it!” - Hemingway

"The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become." - Charles Dubois

"If 'science' is converted into ideology, a substitute for philosophy and religion, then rightly men of humane and social imagination will recoil from the fraud." - Russell Kirk

"By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend over America powers of taxation and administration never before exercised, the colonies rose to vindicate their prescriptive freedom; and after the hour for compromise had slipped away, it was with reluctance and trepidation they declared their independence. Thus men essentially conservative found themselves triumphant rebels, and were compelled to reconcile their traditional ideas with the necessities of an independence hardly anticipated." - Russell Kirk, from The Conservative Mind

“[In] sound itself, there is a readiness to be ordered by the spirit and this is seen at its most sublime in music.” - Max Picard

"A life making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." – George Bernard Shaw

"Resentment is the emotion that nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past." ~ Jean Amery, holocaust survivor

"[Comedy's] whole function is to be a perpetual and funny, if disconcerting, reminder that it is the limited concrete which is the path to insight and salvation." - William F. Lynch

"If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point."

Francis Schaeffer cites it and attributes it to Luther in several of his works (The God Who is There, is one place), but he never gives any specific reference for it. The Presbyterian blogger Michael Marlowe makes this statement about it:

"The words that Schaeffer attributes to Martin Luther here (and elsewhere in his writings) sound very much like Luther, but they were actually written by the Victorian-era novelist, Elizabeth Charles. The words appear in her Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family, as if written by the fictional narrator Friedrich ("Fritz") Schönberg. The attribution to Luther was perhaps due to some confusion arising from the fact that in the context this character was explaining why he could not abandon Lutheranism."

'...early in the fifth century, Saint Augustine noted that perceptive non-Christians really did know a great deal about 'the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth'. Given such able observers, he held that it was 'a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics''. -Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, p. 100.

On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is "spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo....

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself....

more...

"When my wife and I arrived at a car dealership to pick up our car after a service, we were told the keys had been locked in it. We went back to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the driver’s side door. As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked. ‘Hey,' I announced to the technician, 'its open!' His reply, 'I know. I already did that side.'"

“Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right...I don't know which will go first - rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.” - John Lennon

A recent Chinese/English greeting: "Merry Charismas to all." - and one recipient's response: "I guess Jesus did have that certain something ..."

“The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former ‘lifestyle’ would suggest that I got. While my so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed...” - Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

“If the government does not propose to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its people, then the people must think about protecting themselves...How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local economy.” – Wendell Berry

“Has not the New England farmer who reads good books as much a right to be considered an intellectual being as any coffee–house Bohemian?” - Russell Kirk

"He is a modest man, who has a good deal to be modest about." - Winston Churchill

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." - Ayn Rand

"You put the 'fun' in dysfunctional... that's what I like about you."

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams

"To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity." - Douglas Adams

"A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery." - John Keats

"A religion without mystery must be a religion without God." - Jeremy Taylor

"Religion that's small enough for our understanding would not be big enough for our needs." - Corrie ten Boom

"The moment the word 'why' crosses your lips, you are doing theology." - Carolyn Custis James

"Listening to God is far more important than giving Him our ideas." - Frank Laubach

"American religion is broad but not deep. It's not that Americans don't believe anything. They believe everything." - pollster George Gallup, Jr. (1930-2011)

"I hate titles. I put up with it to be polite but even when people call me their pastor I say, 'Thank you very much, thats kind, but we'll find out the first time I have to tell you no whether or not I'm really your pastor. That's the way that it works and I'm really good at saying 'no'...'" - John Wimber

"The Scriptures are shallow enough for a babe to come and drink without fear of drowning and deep enough for theologians to swim in without ever reaching the bottom." - St. Jerome

David Bentley Hart: "God is no more likely (and a good deal less likely) to be found in theology than in poetry and fiction."

Tom Clougherty: “The trouble with so much architecture from the post-war period is that the state was the client – architects designed housing projects with little or no concern for the people who would actually live in them. The design of housing estates did not reflect the way people lived, worked and played. Rather, it reflected a utopian socialist ideology which central planners wished to impose upon them. Of course, that attempt failed miserably.”

Christopher Dawson: “A scientific specialist or a technologist is not an educated person. He tends to become merely an instrument of the industrialist or the bureaucrat, a worker ant in an insect society, and the same is true of the literary specialist, though his social function is less obvious.”[25]

"Most of us are not really so arrogant as to think we have a right to remold the world in our image. The best we can do, toward redeeming the states of Europe and Asia from the menace of revolution and the distresses of our time, is to realize our own conservative character, suspicious of doctrinaire alteration, respectful toward history, preferring variety over uniformity, acknowledging a moral order composed of human persons, not of mere political and economic atoms subservient to the state. We have not been appointed the correctors of mankind; but, under God, we may be an example to mankind." - Russell Kirk

"Professors and priests are meant to be the conservators of mankind, to which end they are set among men, reminding us that we are not the flies of a summer. Their labor is to tell men that certain truths endure, that upon human nature a peculiar character has been stamped by the Creator with which we tamper at our peril, and that the complex of ideas and methods which we call civilization cannot subsist without moral sanctions. Priest and professor are meant to show men the mysterious coherence and continuity which binds all things in their places." - Russell Kirk, in 1963

“Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.” - Russell Kirk

Renaming

MUMBAI, India (AP) – More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean "unwanted" in Hindi chose new names Saturday for a fresh start in life.

A central Indian district held a renaming ceremony it hopes will give the girls new dignity and help fight widespread gender discrimination that gives India a skewed gender ratio, with far more boys than girls.

The 285 girls — wearing their best outfits with barrettes, braids and bows in their hair — lined up to receive certificates with their new names along with small flower bouquets from Satara district officials in Maharashtra state.

In shedding names like "Nakusa" or "Nakushi," which mean "unwanted" in Hindi, some girls chose to name themselves after Bollywood stars like "Aishwarya" or Hindu goddesses like "Savitri." Some just wanted traditional names with happier meanings, such as "Vaishali" or "prosperous, beautiful and good."

"Now in school, my classmates and friends will be calling me this new name, and that makes me very happy," said a 15-year-old girl who had been named Nakusa by a grandfather disappointed by her birth. She chose the new name "Ashmita," which means "very tough" or "rock hard" in Hindi. (more...)

Politics are effective when inspired by selflessness. - unknown

"The boys in Golding’s novel [Lord of the Flies] are not unsupervised. They are absolutely alone. There is no home to go to, no school, no church. There are no adults to turn to, to allay their fears. Death looms nearby. Under such circumstances they naturally form alliances, and those, so far as they are acts of the imagination, are good and natural things. The same may be said for the city gang. It is not that these boys spend too much time outside of the home. It is that they have no genuine home to spend time outside of." - Anthony Esolen in Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

"I read science fiction the way I read cookbooks. I get all the way through, shut the book and say, 'Yeah, like that's ever gonna happen.'"

Seen on T-shirts at a pirate-themed party:
***
Underneath a skull and crossbones: “Nautical Acquisition & Redistribution Specialist”

“The danger of leaving people with doubts they did not previously have is only equal to the danger of leading people to certainties they did not earn.”

"As for Lawrence — on behalf of whom Eliot was a witness at the trial for alleged obscenity in Lady Chatterly’s Lover — 'It would seem that for Lawrence any spiritual force was good, and that evil resided only in the absence of spirituality. . . . The man’s vision is spiritual, but spiritually sick'.” – Russell Kirk, from T. S. Eliot on Literary Morals

"Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society." - St. Francis of Assisi

“Tolkien understands the deepest of our longings and makes us understand them better than before: To have a home. To be expected. To be welcomed from the night into the warm circle of firelight. To be loved and to love. To hold an innocent child and to see the promise of a future in that smiling face.” - Mark T. Mitchell, from The Beauty of Tolkien’s Quest

“Truth comes in two formats: enlightenments and collisions with reality.” - unknown

Amatuers practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong.

The theological category of sin has been replaced, in many circles, with the psychological concept of therapy. As Philip Reiff has argued, the “Triumph of the Therapeutic” is now a fixture of modern American culture. Church members may make poor choices, fail to live up to the expectations of an oppressive culture, or be inadequately self-actualized—but they no longer sin. (more...) - Mohler

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones." - John Wooden

“Fortitude without justice is a source of evil.” - St. Thomas Aquinas

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." - John LeCarre

“God hasn’t given this generation - so accustomed to opinion polls that want to know what we think - the luxury of remaking theology on the fly and redefining the gospel.” - Randy Alcorn

Roman Emperor Julian (the Apostate): "It is [the Christians'] philanthropy toward strangers, the care they take of the graves of the dead, and the affected sanctity with which they conduct their lives that have done [the] most to spread their atheism."

"And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to the divine ordinance." - Russell Kirk, from The Conservative Mind

"We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone." - Wendell Berry

“None are so empty as those who are full of themselves.” - unattributed

“Yeah, they’re dating now. But neither of them have changed their status on Facebook, so it’s not ‘official’ yet.”

Mystery

"Common sense does not eschew logic as such. But it does see that at the origin of things is a reality whose ways are not our ways. This is what the mystic also sees. It is the fanatic who does not see this limitation, but chooses rather to follow the logic of his position even when it leads him to absurdity. Things are, and can be known. But likewise things “are not what they seem.” We did not create them and must be prepared to find in them more than we could imagine. Call this mysticism or true philosophy or revelation, it is what we discover when we encounter any thing that is." - James Schall

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it..." - Albert Einstein

"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint." - Edmund Burke, English statesman, Whig member of Parliament, and grandfather of modern conservatism

"Lincoln was a conservative statesman on the intellectual model of Cicero. In his dignity there was no hubris, no presumption; much, he knew, must be left to Providence." - Russell Kirk

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. - CS Lewis

"Things will work out - but I always feel that way after coffee." - Anonymous

"When I am consumed by my problems - stressed out about my life, my family, and my job - I actually convey the belief that I think the circumstances are more important than God's command to always rejoice." - Francis Chan

If any be a devout lover of God,
let him partake with gladness from this fair and radiant feast.
If any be a faithful servant,
let him enter rejoicing into the joy of his Lord.
If any have wearied himself with fasting,
let him now enjoy his reward.
If any have laboured from the first hour,
let him receive today his rightful due.
If any have come after the third,
let him celebrate the feast with thankfulness.
If any have come after the sixth,
let him not be in doubt, for he will suffer no loss.
If any have delayed until the ninth,
let him not hesitate but draw near.
If any have arrived only at the eleventh,
let him not be afraid because he comes so late.

For the Master is generous and accepts the last even as the first.
He gives rest to him who comes at the eleventh hour
in the same was as him who has laboured from the first.
He accepts the deed, and commends the intention.

Enter then, all of you, into the joy of our Lord.
First and last, receive alike your reward.
Rich and poor, dance together.
You who fasted and you who have not fasted, rejoice together.
The table is fully laden: let all enjoy it.
The calf is fatted: let none go away hungry.

Let none lament his poverty;
for the universal Kingdom is revealed.
Let none bewail his transgressions;
for the light of forgiveness has risen from the tomb.
Let none fear death;
for death of the Savour has set us free.

He has destroyed death by undergoing death.
He has despoiled hell by descending into hell.
Hell was filled with bitterness when it met Thee face to face below;
filled with bitterness, for it was brought to nothing;
filled with bitterness, for it was mocked;
filled with bitterness, for it was overthrown;
filled with bitterness, for it was put in chains .
Hell received a body, and encountered God. It received earth, and confronted heaven.
O death, where is your sting?
O hell, where is your victory?

Christ is risen! And you, o death, are annihilated!
Christ is risen! And the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is risen! And the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen! And life is liberated!
Christ is risen! And the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power, now and forever, and from all ages to all ages.
Amen!

John Chrysostom

A Christ-centred worship - which is event-oriented worship - can never be static and merely intellectual because what happens is an actual and real communication of the power and benefit of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Worshiping churches recognize that every gathering of worship is ultimately a praise and thanksgiving for the overthrow of evil by God in Christ. This victory not only happened two thousand years ago, but it happens today in the lives of people who bring to worship their own struggles against that evil which shatters relationships, oppresses the poor, and brings constant dislocation into life. - Robert Webber

Gen. Sir Charles Napier in India, explaining to the locals his position on suttee - the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

George Orwell, from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

"What binds society together? The libertarians reply that the cement of society (so far as they will endure any binding at all) is self-interest, closely joined to the nexus of cash payment. But the conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship and Christians call love of neighbor." - Russell Kirk

Calvin Coolidge, upon leaving the presidency in March 1929: “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”

"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today." - Laurence J. Peter

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Seneca

"Genius may have it's limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." - Elbert Hubbard

"An artist must have the conception of what he intends to make within himself, be it a picture, carving, music or anything else, it must be there in his own mind complete. The making of it in paint or stone or wood or sound is a little image of the Incarnation, the "Word made flesh." When it is made, its validity as a work of art depends upon whether others recognize in it the expression of something that is inarticulate in themselves." - Caryll Houselander

Wife: "Do you have the destruction manual?"
Husband: "Nope, we have kids for that."

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." - Martin Luther King Jr.

The duty of the pastor is not to invite his congregation (and certainly not the general public) to join him as he meanders through his own personal journey of self discovery. His duty is to lead people to Jesus Christ. - Matt Kennedy

"I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the Universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge." - C. S. Lewis, responding to a letter from Arthur C. Clarke

“As St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ..." - G. K. Chesterton

Paula Poundstone: "If we tax the use of the word "like", we could restore the budget surplus."

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." - W. B. Yeats

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.-

Corrie ten Boom

Adult: "What did you learn from Zechariah?"

6-yr-old: "How not to talk to an angel."

"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint." - Edmund Burke

"We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I confess the Cross, because I know of the Resurrection." - St. Cyril of Jersualem

“When the only verse of the Christmas story you identify with is ‘They came with haste,’ it’s time to reevaluate the season.” - Alice N. Daniels

“Fear will always knock on your door. Just don’t invite it in for dinner. And for heaven’s sake, don’t offer it a bed for the night.” - Max Lucado

“There are no rules here. We are trying to accomplish something.” - Thomas Edison

“[The] new phones don’t require punching buttons, which were already too small for my fingers. Now it’s all touch screen technology and hooked up to the Internet….Not only do I need a degree in computer science to work the thing¸ but my fingers haven’t gotten any smaller. The first night I ended up accidentally calling a number of people, including a former high school girlfriend who now lives in Idaho or something, at 11 p.m. The next morning I apparently ‘poked’ another woman on Facebook whom I haven’t seen in 15 years. I never bothered with this poking business on Facebook before, so I don’t understand it. But if you would’ve told me 10 years ago I’d need my phone to tell when or if I poked a woman, I would’ve thrown my pager at you.” - Tony Hicks

“We feel naked if we go to the store and forget to bring our cell phone-camera-Internet browser because maybe there’s a melon in the produce section that looks just like our old wood-shop teacher’s head and we absolutely NEED to immediately send a picture to all 455 people we went to high school with, but haven’t seen in 21 years.” - Tony Hicks

"The beauty of the internet is that you can attribute any quote you want to any famous figure throughout history, link it to a wiki page that you edited, and nobody will ever question its validity." - Thomas Jefferson

"We have a strange prejudice nowadays — perhaps it is really a superstition — that truth is a function of time, i.e., that being later in time and truer are more or less identical, as if the best way to avoid error is to hold off being born as long as possible." - Benjamin Wiker

"We live in an era when the passions of ideology and the passions of religion become joined in certain zealots. Thus we hear intemperate talk, in many communions and denominations, of Christian revolution. Most of the men and women who use such language undoubtedly mean a bloodless, if abrupt, transformation of social institutions. Yet some of them nowadays, as in past times, would not scruple at a fair amount of bloodletting in their sacred cause. Whether bloodless or bloody, an upheaval justified by the immanentizing of Christian symbols of salvation defies the Beatitudes and devours its children. Soon the Christian ideologues (an insane conjunction) find themselves saddled and ridden by some 'great bad man', a Cromwell at best." - Russell Kirk

"Populism is a revolt against the Smart Guys. I am very ready to confess that the present Smart Guys, as represented by the dominant mentality of the Academy and of what the Bergers call the Knowledge Class today, are insufficiently endowed with right reason and moral imagination. But it would not be an improvement to supplant them by persons of thoroughgoing ignorance and incompetence." - Russell Kirk

"I have read the entire Qur'an and can find no guidance in it on how Muslims should live as a minority in a society. I have read the entire New Testament and can find no guidance in it on how Christians should live as a majority." - a Muslim

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Cicero

10 Rules for Apologetics

Over the years, I have learned five things about the sort of people who write strangers to ask religious questions: 1) even a question about an apparently trivial matter or a wildly unfair criticism may reflect a real spiritual struggle; 2) most inquirers are looking more for confirmation or consolation than engagement and teaching; 3) many of those who honestly want to be taught do not want to be taught that much, beyond a “yes” or a “no” and a two sentence explanation; 4) many who ask your advice believe they know as much as you even though they have never read more than three pages on the subject; and 5) few will read you closely and will instead often misread what you’ve written as agreement or approval because that is what they really want.

Here are ten rules developed from my experiences writing people I don't know, for those who find them helpful.

They also apply to the kinds of discussions any Christian whose faith is known will get into, with the curious neighbor, the office atheist (usually a relative of the village atheist), the spouse's most annoying uncle, even the skeptic in the next pew on Sunday mornings. You may know almost nothing, and feel hopelessly inadequate, but they asked you and you must give them a reason for the hope that is within you.

First, not all questions need or deserve an answer, but you can only sometimes discern the cases in which a tactful silence, a gentle non-answer, or a rebuke is best. Sometimes rudeness masks a serious search and wide-eyed openness hides a desire only for endless discussion or for trapping you into writing something on which they can leap. One learns to recognize the types with practice, but never with much assurance. (more...)

"It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg 71.

"Without the Holy Spirit there would be no gospel and no New Testament. When Christ left the world, he committed his cause to his disciples. But what sort of witnesses were they likely to prove? They had never been good pupils; they had consistently failed to understand Christ and missed the point of his teaching throughout his earthly ministry; how could they be expected to do better now that he had gone? Was it not virtually certain that, with the best will in the world, they would soon get the truth of the gospel inextricably mixed up with a mass of well-meant misconceptions, and their witness would rapidly be reduced to a twisting, garbled, hopeless muddle? The answer to this question is no - because Christ sent the Holy Spirit to them, to teach them all truth and so save them from all error, to remind them of what they had been taught already and to reveal to them the rest of what their Lord meant for them to learn." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg 69.

“God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature” - C.S. Lewis

"The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

“You would be surprised – or, maybe you wouldn’t be – by the number of people who see no inconsistency in voicing their disdain for hunting as they bite into a double cheeseburger….If you are a vegetarian anti-hunter, I applaud your consistency. But if you have a taste for baby back ribs, keep in mind that they don’t grow on trees.” - Lansing State Journal columnist John Schneider

"If you want to hear from God, read your Bible; if you want to audibly hear from God, read your Bible out loud." - Justin Peters

Knowledge vs. Wisdom

‎"Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." ~ Peter Kaye

Every father should remember that one day his son will follow his example and not his advice. - Anonymous

Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg. 34

Daniel and his friends were men who stuck their necks out. This was not foolhardiness. They knew what they were doing. They had counted the cost. They had measured the risk. They were well aware what the outcome of their actions would be unless God miraculously intervened, as in fact he did.

But these things did not move them. Once they were convinced that their stand was right, and that loyalty to their God required them to take it, then, in Oswald Chamber's phrase, they "smilingly washed their hands of the consequences." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg. 30

"When despair for the world grows in me, and I awake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and childrens' lives may be, I go lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief....For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free." - Wendell Berry

“There is no shadow of a doubt that the rakish society of the Restoration began by tolerating indecency for the sake of wit, and ended by tolerating dullness for the sake of indecency.” - Agnes Repplier, on the famously raunchy stage comedy of the English Restoration

"We should avoid ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden we ourselves ought to bear." - George Washington

"The real question of the moral life, at least as far as philosophical 'warrant' is at issue, is not whether one personally needs God in order to be good, but whether one needs God in order for the good to be good." - another from David Bentley Hart

"Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power." — David Bentley Hart, from The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth

“I often wonder about people who live in tropical destinations. What do their screen savers look like?” - comedian Derick Lengwenus

"Children are like wet cement; whatever falls on them makes an impression" - Dr. Haim Ginott

Not so Great Moments in Faith...

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." - C. S. Lewis

“A prophet’s task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day.” - Kathleen Norris, from her book The Cloister Walk

“The Incarnation is the most dramatic thing that ever entered into the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.” - Dorothy Sayers

"Agnosticism, when it becomes an ear-stopping dogma, may be as bad a mental handicap as superstition." - Herman Wouk

"Experience is a slippery slope philosophically and spiritually. It’s a fog in which all sorts of worlds can bump together. Now, no one wants to go to extremes. Some lines are drawn in the sand. For example, no one in their right mind would endorse mass murder. But we need to follow a path of wisdom and have standards. When you come into the life of the Church, there is a way of life followed there. There are codes of conduct. It’s like when you come into someone’s home. You take off your muddy boots when you enter the house. You don’t take tea and pour it down someone’s back. There are standards in how we live together. Experience needs to be affirmed, redirected, and rebuked by God’s authority. Because of our propensity to self-deception, we constantly need to check against scripture, whether we are allowing the word of God’s grace in the gospel, and God’s reaffirmation of us as made in his image, to validate what is in fact an idolatrous and distorted form of humanness. When, through letting scripture be he vehicle of God’s judging and healing authority in our communities and individual lives, we really do “experience” God’s affirmation, then we shall know as we are known." - N.T. Wright

"The Bible is here to equip God’s people to carry forward His purposes of new covenant and new creation. It is there to enable people to work for justice, to sustain their spirituality as they do so, to create and enhance relationships at every level, and to produce that new creation which will have something of the beauty of God himself. The Bible isn’t like an accurate description of how a car is made. It’s more like the mechanic who helps you fix it, the garage attendant who refuels it, and the guide who tells you how to get where you’re going. And where you’re going is to make God’s new creation happen in his world, not simply to find your own way unscathed through the old creation." - N.T. Wright

"Our assumption is that Church is where you say the things that have to be said. So people will speak but say, "Oh, I wouldn't say that in church." Well then, where would you say it? To me, it's the place where you would push it the furthest. A faith community should be the place with the most honesty and vulnerability and prophetic culture—calling things what they are. So when I hear people say, "That's nice but you really couldn't do that in church," I can't even fathom that. My understanding is it would lead the culture in reality." - Rob Bell

"I think that's one of the most warped ideas—that God just can't wait to bless you. God blesses you so you will bless the world and if at any point I keep that for myself, then I am in trouble." - unknown

“The problem with our churches today is that the lead pastor is some sissy boy who wears cardigan sweaters, has The Carpenters dialed in on his iPod, gets his hair cut at a salon instead of a barber shop, hasn’t been to an Ultimate Fighting match, works out on an elliptical machine instead of going to isolated regions of Russia like in Rocky IV in order to harvest lumber with his teeth, and generally swishes around like Jack from Three’s Company whenever Mr. Roper was around.” - Mark Driscoll

"People who know their God are before anything else people who pray, and the first point where their zeal and energy for God's glory come to expression is in their prayers....Yet the invariable fruit of true knowledge of God is energy to pray for God's cause - energy indeed which can only find an outlet and a relief of inner tension when channeled into such prayer - and the more knowledge, the more energy! By this we may test ourselves. Perhaps we are not in a position to make public gestures against ungodliness and apostasy. Perhaps we are old, or ill, or otherwise limited by our physical situation. But we can all pray about the ungodliness and apostasy which we see in everyday life all around us. If, however, there is in us little energy for such prayer, and little consequent practice of it, this is a sure sign that as yet we scarcely know our God." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, 28

Those who know God have great energy for God. In one of the prophetic chapters of Daniel we read, "the people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits (11:32 KJV). RSV renders thus: "the people who know their God shall stand firm and take action...While their God is being defied or disregarded, they cannot rest; they feel they must do something; the dishonor done to God's name goads them into action." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, 27

"The question is, can we say, simply, honestly, not because we feel that as evangelicals we ought to, but because it is a plain matter of fact, that we have known God, and that because we have known God the unpleasantness we have had, or the pleasantness that we have not had, through being Christians does not matter to us? If we really knew God, this is what we would be saying, and if we are not saying it, that is a sign that we need to face ourselves more sharply with the difference between knowing God and merely knowing about him." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, 27

"Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God." - J.I Packer, Knowing God

"How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into a matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God." - J.I. Packer

"To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end in itself, to approach Bible study with no higher a motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied self-deception. We need to guard our hearts against such an attitude, and pray to be kept from it. As we saw earlier, there can be no spiritual health without doctrinal knowledge; but it is equally true that there can be no spiritual health with it, if it is sought for the wrong purpose and valued by the wrong standard." - J.I. Packer

If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited. - J.I. Packer

"Knowing God is crucially important for the living of our lives. As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesman to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose you soul."- Charles Spurgeon

"And whilst humbling and expanding, this subject is eminently consolatory. Oh there is in contemplating Christ a balm for every wound; in musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore. Would you lose your sorrows? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead's deepest sea; be lost in the immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trail as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead." - Charles Spurgeon

“St. John the Theologian ….. is called theologian because he actually lent on the breast of Jesus and listened to His heartbeat. That’s Theology!….. to listen to the heartbeat of God. “ - Fr. Meletios Webber

"No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God...But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe..." - Charles Spurgeon

"There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep that our pride is drowned in its infinity." - Charles Spurgeon

"How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure." - Samuel Johnson

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” -- Helen Keller