Classic and contemporary excerpts.
Junk food isn’t enough
The biggest enemy of the Church is the development and proliferation of programs to meet people’s needs. Everyone has a hunger for God, but our tastes (needs) are screwed up. We’ve been raised on junk food, so what we ask for is often wrong or twisted.
—Eugene Peterson in The Door (Nov./Dec. 1991)
God brings out our best
We are all asked to do more than we can do. Every hero and heroine of the Bible does more than he would have thought it possible to do, from Gideon to Esther to Mary. Jacob, one of my favorite characters, certainly wasn’t qualified. He was a liar and a cheat; and yet he was given the extraordinary vision of angels and archangels ascending and descending a ladder which reached from earth to heaven.
—Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water
No white lies
To lie a little is not possible; whoever lies, lies a whole lie.
—Victor Hugo in Les Misérables
The Bible and me
Some [evangelicals] have fixated upon “me and the Bible, and especially me,” so that what Bible reading becomes is primarily an assertion of inward feelings. This has sadly prevented readers from … learning that the Spirit has a history, and that the body of Christ being called forth in that history has unity.… Beware of the “evangelical” who wants to read the Bible without the historic voices of the church, who is only willing to listen to his own voice or the voices of contemporaries in the dialogue. Evangelicals have usually been the losers when they have systematically neglected the saints and martyrs and consensual writers of the earliest Christian centuries.
—Thomas Oden in Good News (Jan.–Feb. 1993)
The trouble with neighbors
Those who glorify the idea of the world turning into a global village may not know much about the behavior of people in villages.
—Lance Morrow in Time (March 15, 1993)
“Adult” movies aren’t
A pretty good case can be made that the “adult movies” for “mature audiences” actually are designed to attract only the most juvenile customers. In an age when every conceivable subgroup of citizens takes offense if they are insulted or stereotyped in the slightest way, adults ought to be ticked off that the word “adult” has come to be used in this manner.
—Bob Greene in the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 7, 1992)
Prayer is not a “distraction”
Many “sophisticated” political and social commentators complain that issues like school prayer are “distractions” having nothing to do with today’s most pressing issues. What they fail to recognize is that a people’s faith is intertwined with the issues of the day.
—William J. Bennett, former secretary of education, in The De-Valuing of America
Amazing grace
Why do we call grace amazing? Grace is amazing because it works against the grain of common sense. Hard-nosed common sense will tell you that you are too wrong to meet the standards of a holy God; pardoning grace tells you that it’s all right in spite of so much in you that is wrong.
Realistic common sense tells you that you are too weak, too harassed, too human to change for the better; grace gives you power to send you on the way to being a better person.
Plain common sense may tell you that you are caught in a rut of fate or futility; grace promises that you can trust God to have a better tomorrow for you than the day you have made for yourself.
—Lewis Smedes in How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong? (quoted by Martin E. Marty in Context)
All flesh is as grass
Consumerism is fed by a desire to forget our mortality.
—Kathleen Norris in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
