Wendell Berry
“The visions of the mind have a debt to reality that is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions.”
Jayber Crow Page 195
Archive for the 'Quotes to Note' Category
James Davison Hunter
“In public discourse, the challenge is not to stifle robust debate, but rather to make sure it is real debate. The first obligation for Christians is to listen carefully to opponents and if they are not willing to do so then Christians should simply be silent. To engage in a war of words is to engage in a symbolic violence that is fundamentally at odds with the gospel. And too often, on such hot button issues as poverty, abortion, race relations and homosexuality, the poor, children, minorities and gays are used as weapons in ideological warfare.”
James Davison Hunter quoted in To Change the World Pg 266
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
“Like prayer, good conversation fashions words into vessels
that carry living water”
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
“…the act of reading itself is not only intellectually and emotionally engaging, but morally consequential. How we choose to read, how we submit to or question or resist the terms set by the writer, are choices that shape the habits of our minds and the habits of our hearts. Those habits determine the degree to which we are open to truth in it’s various guises, and capable of discerning the difference between the ring of truth and the metallic clang of lies.”
Abraham Heschel
“There is only one way to wisdom: awe. Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a marketplace for you. The loss of awe is the great block to insight…. The greatest insights happen to us in moments of awe.”
Thomas Kempis
“It is no great thing to associate with the good and gentle, for such association is naturally pleasing. Everyone enjoys a peaceful life and prefers persons of congenial habits. But to be able to live at peace with harsh and perverse men, or with the undisciplined and those who irritate us, is a great grace, a praiseworthy and manly thing.”
Thomas Kempis: The Imitation of Christ.
John Walton
“No one finds a watch on a beach and thinks that it is a relic of nature; no one looks at Mount Rushmore and concludes that it is the result of wind and erosion. But when these products of intelligent design are recognized, the process to understand them becomes a historical one, not a scientific one. To recognize them as products of design is to remove them from the arena of scientific investigation.”
John H Walton Quoted in The Lost World of Genesis One pg 128.
Wendell Berry
“If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have only seen them in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.”
Quoted from his book Jayber Crow
William Penn
“… the less form in religion the better, since God is a Spirit; for the more mental our worship, the more adequate to the nature of God; the more silent, the more suitable to the language of a Spirit.”
Tim Keel
“When God works within a servant who is wholly available an integrity emerges that cannot be manufactured. This life integration is vital for those who would host and draw out the words of God for and from a community of Christ’s people.”
