"We must be constantly aware of our responsibility in the Communion of Saints, without giving our honored predecessors the final say or making them an 'alternative source,' independent of scripture itself...The challenge of living with tradition is not so much, as in official Roman Catholic understandings, that one should let tradition and scripture flow together straightforwardly into a single stream, but that tradition should be allowed to be itself; that is, the living voice of the very human church as it struggles with scripture, sometimes mis-understanding it and sometimes gloriously getting it right. That is why the challenge comes fresh to each generation. Tradition tells us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going." - N.T. Wright, The Last Word, pg. 119

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in the times of moral crisis." - Dante

"I am not reaping the harvest; I scarcely claim to be sowing the seed: I am hardly ploughing the soil; but I am gathering out the stones. That, too, is missionary work." - Missionary Robert Bruce in reference to his translation of the Bible into Persian. Quoted in Anglicanism, by Stephen Neill

"The first missionary of the C.M.S in East Africa, the German Dr J. L. Krapf, reached Mombasa in 1844. Almost his first task was to bury his wife and child; but he wrote to the society:

'Tell our friends that there is now on the East African coast a lonely missionary grave. This is a sign that you have commenced the struggle with this part of the world; and as the victories of the Church are gained by stepping over the graves of her members, you may be the more convinced that the hour is at hand when you are summoned to the conversion of Africa from its Eastern shore.'" - Stephen Neill, Anglicanism, pg 345

Providence

"In Burma, the Karens had strangely been prepared for the Gospel by an ancient tradition that one day the white man would come and bring back to them the Word of God, which they had once possessed, but had lost in the course of their wanderings." - Stephen Neill, Anglicanism pg 326

It is also generally supposed that the Church flew into an unnecessary panic over the attempts of innocent and disinterested scientists to understand the secrets of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the Christian faith was the object of the unremitting, skillful, and malevolent attacks of enemies who wished for nothing more ardently than the total disappearance of that faith from the earth. Of such attacks Darwin himself must be declared wholly innocent; but what is true of Darwin is very far from being true of all his disciples. - Stephen Neill, Anglicanism pg 263

"But it is a mistake to imagine that Evangelicalism is a form of religious individualism. The Evangelicals certainly insisted on the vital significance of the relation of the individual to God, and each maintained his own rugged independence of all others. But true Evangelical religion always tends to intense and intimate fellowships; and one of the characteristic manifestations is the formation of societies.

The most famous of all these came to be known as the Clapham sect. By far the most famous of the group was William Wilberforce the nightingale of the House of Commons... But others were almost equally distinguished. Sir John Shore, Lord Teignmouth had been governor-general of India...Henry Thornton was a wealthy banker. These men lived for many years in a close association and amity to which there is no exact parallel in English Church history. The central interest of their lives was the practice of the Christian faith. Their watchwords were diligence, simplicity, and generosity. Henry Thornton regularly gave away 2/3rds of his income, and in the midst of his busy practical life found time to spend three hours a day in prayer.

The Christian life as they understood it was a simple, cheerful, vigorous, manly affair, entirely free from gloom or introspection. When the last of them was dead, the younger Stephen wrote, 'Oh, where are the people, who are at once really religious and really cultivated in heart and understanding - the people with whom we could associate as our fathers used to associate with each other? No 'Clapham Sect' nowadays.'" - Stephen Neill, Anglicanism

Abortion

Stupak.

Etymology: Eponym for Rep. Bart Stupak.

Function: verb

1: In a legislative process, to obstruct passage of a proposed law on the basis of a moral principle (i.e., protecting the unborn), accumulating power in the process, then at a key moment surrendering in exchange for a fig leaf, the size of which varies according to the degree of emasculation of said legislator and/or as a reflection of just how stupid people are presumed to be. (Slang: backstabber.)

Poor Bart Stupak. The man tried to be a hero for the unborn, and then, when all the power of the moment was in his frail human hands, he dropped the baby. He genuflected when he should have dug in his heels and gave it up for a meaningless executive order.

Now, in the wake of his decision to vote for a health-care bill that expands public funding for abortion, he is vilified and will forever be remembered as the guy who Stupaked health-care reform and the pro-life movement.

Arrogance

"God created man in His own image; then man returned the favor" - Unknown

"Anglicanism is a very positive form of Christian belief...Its challenge can be summed up in the phrase, 'Show us anything clearly set forth in Holy Scripture that we do not teach, and we will teach it; show us anything in our teaching and practice that is plainly contrary to Holy Scripture, and we will abandon it." - Stephen Neill

Contemporary Heresy

"Broadly speaking, the Episcopal Church is in conflict with Scripture. The only way to justify it is to say, well, Jesus talks about the Spirit guiding the church and guiding believers and bringing to their awareness things they cannot deal with yet. So one would have to say that the mind of Christ operative in the church over time...has led the church to in effect contradict the words of the Gospel." - Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold in an interview with the Philadelphia Enquirer, December 28, 1997

"Any unity that does not recognize Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and does not recognize the Bible as the authoritative Word of God, is an idol. And that idol must never be worshipped." - John Ruchyana, Never Silent, pg 100

"We never keep quiet when something is going wrong. I was taught this principle many times growing up. The one who commits sin and the one who stands by in silence, doing nothing about it, are guilty of the same crime and deserve the same punishment." - John Ruchyana, Never Silent, pg 85

The Price of Inaction

"It was Canadian Army General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, who had warned the UN before the genocide broke out. 'Not one country on Earth,' he said in a recent interview, 'came to stop this thing. The Western world provided me with nothing.' In June 2000, he was 'found unconscious on a park bench in Hull, Quebec, drunk and alone. He had consumed a bottle of scotch on top of his daily dose of pills for post-traumatic stress disorder. He was on another suicide mission.' The Canadian news picked up the story. Dallaire would simply say in reply, 'There are times when the best medication and therapist simply can't help a soldier suffering from this new generation of peacekeeping injury... My soul is in Rwanda. It has never, ever come back, and I'm not sure it ever will.'" - Thaddeus Barnum, Never Silent, pg 84

Courage and Indifference in the Face of Genocide

"The infiltrators demanded the girls separate into their ethnic groupings - Hutus on one side, Tutsis on the other. John wrote, 'They were trying to finish the work of the genocide and kill off all the Tutsis. But these girls refused to separate. They had borne the pain of war in their hearts. They had lost too many family members. So they decided to stand together as fellow Rwandans and not let their captors identify themselves either as Hutu or Tutsi.' With that, John said, the rebels randomly opened fire, killing seventeen girls and one white missionary who worked at the school. Several were wounded. 'We are not despaired by evil,' John wrote letter. 'These girls made a stand. No one would expect young girls to face death and state a real challenge to their killers. They have told the country and the world that Rwanda is living in a new day. We will not be separated anymore. We are a united people. It is time to move forward. I am telling you, we shall never forget these brave girls.' .....History would later record that President Clinton did not convene a single meeting of his senior foreign policy advisers to discuss U.S. options for Rwanda. - Thaddeus Barnum & John Ruchyana, Never Silent, pg 50

I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes where they are and stands still, and finds that he is smiling, and not by his own will. - Wendell Berry

"Don't tell me of your feelings. A traveler would be glad of fine weather, but if he be a man of business, he will go on [without it]." - John Newton

"The dissolution of the idea of truth—of truth that does not need my approval in order to be true—severely undercuts the Christian understanding of evangelization or mission. Missionary proclamation was once understood as bringing the truth to others, and was therefore both legitimate and extremely important. For many today, the missionary enterprise is a matter of imposing our personal preferences and culturally conditioned prejudices upon others, and is therefore not only illegitimate but morally offensive. Beyond the question of missions, we might ask ourselves why people should embrace the Christian faith unless they think that the apostolic teaching is true. More precisely, today the question is whether it is even meaningful to claim that Christian teaching is true. The idea of truth is absolutely vital for the Christian faith. The destruction of that idea is key to legitimating a secularist culture, since the idea of truth touches on secularism's greatest vulnerability." - Wolfhart Pannenberg

Madness

"The life of an ant and that of my child should be granted equal consideration." - Michael W. Fox, Vice President, Humane Society of the United States

Healing of Families

"When families get too busy, the first things that go are their rituals. Families need more nourishing activities. As adults, people remember 3 kinds of activities: meals, vacations and time outdoors."

Pg. 59

"I think the natural world has great power to heal and restore broken families." Pg. 59

Mary Pipher The Shelter of Eachother

Serving Everyone as if Serving Christ

Abraham and wife prepare with their own hands--serving with joy and anticipation though they had servants to do so.

And if you give to the poor, do not disdain to give them yourself. For it is not [ultimately] to the poor that it is given, but to Christ Himself. And who is so wretched - [selfish] to stretch out his hand to Christ?

St. John Chrysostom XIV on 1 Timothy

We are What We Eat

In the Biblical story of creation, man is presented, first of all, as a hungry being...and the whole world as his food...

He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as an all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life.

Schmemann For the Life of the World pg 11

Vocation

It means that the layman also is called to be a saint; that the place in which he must work out his saintliness is the home, the bank, the factory, the dock, the field; and that, if he has understood his vocation, he can be sure that God will be as much with him there as he is with the priest saying the services in the Church." - Stephen Neill, Anglicanism, pg 51

"For we shall not understand the Reformers at all, unless we realize that what these men were primarily concerned about was holiness....They were convinced that the new understanding of the Gospel, with its appeal to the whole man, mind and conscience and will, could bring about that inner reformation that to them was more important than any change in ritual or in the organization of the Church." - Stephen Neill, Anglicanism, pg 50

"Luther has become a figure of controversy, and many people think of him only as a polemical writer and iconoclast. But this is fundamentally to misunderstand him. Luther was primarily a great preacher, and a great teacher of the Bible. - Stephen Neill, Anglicanism, pg 47

"More have I not to say, my lords, but that like as the blessed Apostle St. Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present and consented to the death of St. Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now both twain holy saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends together forever, so I verily trust, and shall therefore right heartily pray, that though your lordships have now here in earth been Judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation. And thus I desire Almighty God to preserve and defend the king's Majesty, and to send him good council." - Sir Thomas More speaking to his executioners before his martyrdom

"Henry was not an unconscientious man. He had a sensitive conscience; the only trouble was that his conscience so often told him that what he wanted to do was right" - Stephen Neill commenting on King Henry VIII

Not So Great Moments in Democracy

"I order you to hold a free election, but nevertheless, I forbid you to elect anyone except Richard my clerk, the archdeacon of Poiters." - King Henry of England to the monks in Winchester

"For things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Choose, therefore, from every Church those things that are pious, religious, and upright, and when you have as it were made them up into one body, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereunto." - Pope Gregory advising Augustine of Canterbury prior to his mission to England, AD 597

"No man is an island, entirely of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." - John Donne

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too,

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you:

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

- Rudyard Kipling's poem If

"In a good coach/player relationship there should be a tension. It's my job to bring them to their potential, and that's never entirely comfortable for them. Maybe some of them don't like the way I push them. Bummer. There may be times when I'm driving a player when all she's hearing is, 'I don't like you' or 'I don't respect you,' but I obviously respected her game enough to pick her to play for me. My players don't have to like me for me to like them. You have to coach through your own personality, so I'm never going to be their fairy godmother. I'm going to get after them, because that's who I am and who I've always been." - UNC Coach Anson Dorrance (The Man Watching, Tim Crothers, pg. 272)

"During one game against N.C. State when Dorrance was suffering from laryngitis, the insults he asked [assistant coach] Bill Palladino to voice to the referee got Palladino tossed out of the game. Dorrance explains his outbursts by saying, 'It's an effort to demonstrate to my players that I'm behind them. Accepting all the injustice in the world might get you to Buddhist nirvana, but it doesn't help you soccer team win.'" - (The Man Watching, by Tim Crothers)

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of good deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

"[At a University of North Carolina booster club appearance] field hockey coach Karen Shelton thanked the Tar Heel fans for their support, talked about her team's season, and concluded by saying, 'I'm most proud of the fact that our kids had the highest GPA we've ever had.' After some polite applause, Dorrance then stood up for his remarks. 'I was also really proud of my girls for having the highest GPA we've ever had, but then we lost the national championship game, so I say...bring back the dumb ones!'"

"Before facing the Tar Heels later in the 2003 NCAA Tournament, Purdue coach Rob Klatte compared the challenge of beating UNC in Chapel Hill to climbing Mount Everest, which isn't exactly accurate because many more people have successfully scaled Everest." - Tim Crothers, The Man Watching

Women's Soccer

"So when you're tackling out there today, I want you to throw your body at the girl with such a clattering of bones and gristle that she'll be worried about having a scar from her kneecap to her ankle. I want her wondering, 'If I finish this game, will I ever be able to wear a skirt again?'" - UNC Coach Anson Dorrance (The Man Watching, by Tim Crothers)

"The master addiction is control. It is not lack of courage that keeps us from moving forward, as most people think; it is the fear of losing control." - John Roger

“Ideas have consequences.” – Richard Weaver

If you love the good disciples, no thanks are due to you on that account; but rather seek by meekness to subdue the more troublesome. Every kind of wound is not healed with the same medicine. Mitigate violent attacks of disease by gentle applications. Be in all things "wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." - St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to Polycarp

Polytheism

In times of old evil demons showed such fearful sights to men, that those who did not use their reason in judging the actions that were done, were struck with terror; and being carried away by fear, and not knowing that these were demons, they called them gods, and gave to each the name which each of the demons chose for himself. - St. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chp 5