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