Classic and contemporary excerpts
PRIDE’S OPPOSITE
Paul suggests something striking in his chapter on love: that the opposite of love is not hate, but pride.… Paul says two things that love is: patient and kind. Patience implies a hopeful contentment with the present rather than an agitated, proud indignation that I don’t yet have what I think I deserve. Kindness requires that I give of myself rather than expect something of others.
—John Boykin in The Gospel of Coincidence
THE VULNERABLE LEADER
The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her vulnerable self.
—Henri Nouwen in In the Name of Jesus
CIVILIZATION IN DECLINE
Two welfare mothers were charged with first degree murder in Miami. They left their children locked in a room and went out for a night on the town. The children got out and one of them drowned.… Bill Bennett tells the story of watching Oprah and seeing a single mother defend her active social life by saying that she needed a life. “In five minutes, I watched 5,000 years of civilization turned on its head.”
—Roberto Rivera in his “Daily News Summary” (Sept. 13, 1995)
SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE
God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own … by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.
—Dorothy L. Sayers in The Man Born to Be King
CHURCH SUPERSEDES INDIVIDUALISM
The elite culture is so wedded to individualism, choice, secularity and freedom from restraint that it cannot accept the fact that religions are communities that operate in and out of the political arena on shared moral beliefs.
As [Stephen] Carter writes, the churches are intermediate institutions (situated between the individual and the state) “to which citizens owe a separate allegiance.” Religion is a form of organized resistance to the state and culture. Its social and political function is to resist conventional wisdom on grounds of clear principle: “A religion is, at its heart, a way of denying the authority of the rest of the world.”
—John Leo, commenting on Stephen Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief, in U.S. News & World Report (Sept. 20, 1993)
ROOT OF ALL EVIL
Once the longing for money comes, the longing also comes for what money can give: superfluities, nice rooms, luxuries at table, more clothes, fans and so on. Our needs will increase, for one thing brings another, and the result will be endless dissatisfaction. This is how it comes.
—Mother Teresa in Jesus, the Word to Be Spoken
MIXED VALUES
For a little reward men make a long journey; for eternal life many will scarce lift a foot once from the ground.
—Thomas a Kempis in The Imitation of Christ
TRUE DEVOTION
He has not learned the nature of piety who thinks it too much to be pious in all his actions.
—William Law in A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
GOD’S DEFENSE ATTORNEY
In my early years as a pastor I would have admitted there was much about God I didn’t know; in practice, though, I always felt I needed to have an answer when a grieving mother asked why God allowed a three-year-old to die, or an anguished student wanted to grasp the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freewill, or a teenager asked for an explanation of the Trinity. Too often this meant I assumed the role of God’s defense attorney, trying my best to bolster God’s public approval rating. Now I’m more likely to say, “I don’t know.” And I feel as though I’ve changed from a sway-back workhorse into a winged Pegasus; not having to carry the crushing weight of theological omniscience has been like the freedom of flight.
—Donald McCullough in The Trivialization of God
