Classic and contemporary excerpts.
Lest We Forget
Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt in a proclamation designating
Bill of Rights Day
Unreliable Witnesses
The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim God with their mouths and deny Him with their lifestyles is what an unbelieving world finds simply unbelievable.
—Karl Rahner, quoted in the
Wittenburg Door (June/July 1988)
Good Companions
Reading molds thinking. As I scan my shelves I spot those books other than the Bible that have influenced my personal thought and ministry, particularly my battle not to become secularized. Unless we maintain constant companionship with Christians who direct our thinking Christianly, we easily fall prey to the spirit of the times.
—Katie Wiebe in the
Christian Leader (Jan. 1987)
Loving God’S Way
We can risk loving as passionately as God loves. For we know that the love God makes possible is no scarce resource that must be hoarded so that it can be distributed in dribs and drabs—a little here and a little there. Love is not a rare commodity; rather, the more we love with the intense particularity of God’s love, the more we discover that we have the capacity to love.
—Stanley Hauerwas, quoted in
Context (Sept. 15, 1989)
Incarnation’S Awful Price
I would not choose the slums of Calcutta, India, for my vacation. There were extraordinary people who worked among the deformity and decay of leper colonies 150 years ago—that is not where most of us would want to live out our lives.
Multiply the distance between where we are now and those places by 1,000 and we still don’t come near the awful distance traveled by the Son of God in the Incarnation.
—John Sartelle in TableTalk (Dec. 1989)
Partnership
Our whole life is to be poised on a certain glad expectancy of God; taking each moment, incident, choice and opportunity as material placed in our hand by the Creator whose whole intricate and mysterious process moves toward the triumph of Charity, and who has given each living spirit a tiny part in this vast work of transformation.
—Evelyn Underhill in
The School of Charity
Church And State
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.
—Martin Luther King, Jr., in
Strength to Love
A Frightening Prospect
Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.
—Studs (Louis) Terkel in
Working
Crippled
Unused truth becomes as useless as an unused muscle.
—A. W. Tozer in
That Incredible Christian
The Incredible Hulk
Hate is born When men call evil good. And like an infant serpent Bursting from its Small, confining shell, It never can be Cased so small again.
—Calvin Miller in
A Requiem for Love
All Is God’S
Now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.
—John Donne in
LXXX Sermons, no. 76
