“When you’re a Christian and a middle linebacker for the Colts, you still hit people when they come over the middle. You just make sure it isn’t a cheap shot.” — Political strategist Ralph Reed, on why he uses negative campaign ads. He says he admits mistakes in going too far, but says, that as with Malchus’s severed ear, “we have to trust Christ to heal it.”
“Nothing is normal here. You try to get used to church in a war zone where people bring weapons into God’s sanctuary. Once we had to leave to help with a mass casualty coming into our main aid station. Today we have no musicians because they are all out on a mission.” — Charlie Fenton, chief military chaplain at the U.S. Army base outside Baquba, Iraq.
“More Chinese feel unstable and harassed by the rootless lives they lead now. The standards of morality are declining. People don’t trust each other anymore. They are looking for something to anchor their lives in.” — Liu Zhongyu, professor at East China Normal University, on a government-sponsored survey that found 300 million religious believers in the country. Government statistics had previously put the figure at 100 million.
“There should be no confusion that deliverance from habitual, life-controlling problems is a journey and not an event. Ted will need years of accountability to demonstrate his victory over both actions and tendencies.” — Larry Stockstill, a Baton Rouge, La., pastor and overseer of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, where National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard served as pastor. Stockstill was responding to another overseer’s remarks that Haggard is now “completely heterosexual” and media reports that Haggard had been “cured.”
“It’s baptizing the city of Los Angeles. It’s a cleaning of the city.” — Pearl Fuquay, one of hundreds of members of Los Angeles’s United House of Prayer that received baptism by firehose in a February outdoor service. All members of the church were encouraged to take part, even those who had already been baptized.
“I promise it will be funnier than Handel, although probably not as good.” — Former Monty Python member Eric Idle, who is writing an oratorio based on the Pythons’ 1979 film, The Life of Brian, to capitalize on the success of Broadway’s “Spamalot.”
“The preachers told us it was a form of worship.” — Basri, one of five Indonesian Muslims arrested (and this week, convicted) for beheading four Christian girls on Sulawesi island.
“You could say that Darwinism is one man’s outdated ideology of the 19th century. And Darwinism sounds like Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism. That’s a problem. … [I]t must be made clear that the modern theory of evolution is in part anti-Darwin. Darwin did not, for instance, take into account the principle of evolution by cooperation.” — German evolutionary biologist Ulrich Kutschera, speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science on why biologists should stop defending and promoting Charles Darwin.
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