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