Words'nTone

“Both [sides, the North and the South] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other … It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces … Let us judge not, that we be not judged” ~Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief during the US Civil War

“This shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it.  Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!  Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!  Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour!  Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!  Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!” ~Father Mapple, Moby Dick

Ask people what they mean by religion and they usually mention God, rules for moral behavior, and whatever happens in their churches, synagogues, or temples.  But behind those beliefs, codes, and forms of worship lie the rituals and values they live by at home: the holiday things that absolutely have to be done; the kinds of success for which no sacrifice or effort would be too much; the sports events that connect with the whole struggle of life; the songs that stand for transcendent love, sadness, and joy; the television shows that express exactly how life is, or should be; the foods and drinks that can yield the last happiness of old age.  This is the realm of domistic religion” ~ Peter Gardella in Domestic Religion: Work, Food, Sex, and Other Commitments, p. 1

“Many evangelical leaders give the appearance of going into battle to maintain a certain morality or a certain standard of living and way of life—even a Kinkadian-like utopian vision of upward mobility and homogeneity…Instead of pointing the finger at the secularists and materialists, we evangelicals need to point it more at ourselves. Jesus did not die to save us from liberals. He died to save us from ourselves.” ~Paul Louis Metzger in Consuming Jesus, pp 33-34

“For every civilization, for every period of history, it is true to say, ‘show me what kind of gods you have, and I will tell you what kind of humanity you possess.’” ~Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt (1939)

Vengeance (ven’jəns) noun
Eye for eye, tooth for tooth; a fair, satisfying and rapid way to a sightless, toothless world.

Mercy (mer’sē) noun
The infrequent art of turning thumbs up on an old antagonist at the end of one’s rapier ~Calvin Miller, The Singer

“…contrary to what is commonly argued, our problem in the public square is not ‘religious totalitarianism,’ and the solution is not a ‘multilingual relativism’ that bans all absolute and exclusive claims.  In a day of exploding diversity, the real question is: how do we live with our deepest differences when many of those differences are absolute, including those of secularism?  This question…is vital for the future of democracy…raising it properly frees us from the distortions of the current public debate” ~Os Guinness in Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.” ~Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“We live in enemy-occupied territory, not neutral ground.  As long as no effort is made to proclaim the gospel throughout the city, the devil may even come to church and make a substantial contribution.  But when signs of community appear in a deteriorating neighborhood, the beast is roused.  His bulldozer engines roar.” ~Rev. Henry K. Yordon, former and long-time pastor of Congregational Church on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut.

“...today’s more experiential descendants of American’s early Protestantism apply faith to but a small portion of their lives, and even less so to public life.  If they have a public faith at all, it is known mostly for its quest for political power.  This truncated faith has boundary lines between sacred and secular, with little cultivation of the commonwealth.  This faith has not bothered to translate truth into social ethics, political philosophy, or practical judgment.  And unlike that of the early Protestants, it gives an inordinate attention to the state, while being culturally impoverished.” ~Don E. Eberly in Restoring the Good Society: A New Vision for Politics and Culture

“Jewish religious leaders certainly made no concerted effort to reach out to Gentiles with redemptive love…Part of their hatred of Jesus grew from the fact that He was unaffected by the barriers they had erected.  Gentiles, Samaritans, tax gatherers, prostitutes, lepers, women—all experienced Jesus’ redemptive love.”

“[Some Christians today] hide behind the church building’s protective walls.  This kind of siege mentality sees the real world as the enemy of piety and separation from the world as the highest expression of faith…An unfortunate reality is that a person can use church activities to avoid a hurting world.” ~Charles Roesel and Donald Atkinson in Meeting Needs, Sharing Christ: Ministry Evangelism in Today’s New Testament Church

“Most people who accept the label ‘conservative Christian,’ or its synonyms, spend too much time throwing stones at the cultural citadels and too little acquiring and developing the skills and knowledge to allow them to compete in the ideological and cultural arena.” ~Cal Thomas

“The real paradox of our time is not poverty in plenty, but unhappiness in the pursuit of pleasure…We have everything that we want materially, and it ought to make us happy, but for some reason it doesn’t.  It should be the case that…where all these material things are most available, where the pursuit of happiness is most ardently undertaken should also be the place where human beings are most happy…In fact, it’s not so. Something has gone wrong. It hasn’t worked.” ~Malcolm Muggeridge

“Each year, we construct the equivalent of many cities, but the pieces don’t add up to anything memorable or of lasting value.  The result doesn’t look like a place, it doesn’t act like a place, and perhaps most significantly it doesn’t act like a place.  Rather it feels like what it is: an uncoordinated agglomeration of standardized single-use zones with little pedestrian life and even less civic identification, connected only by an overtaxed network of roadways” ~Andres, Duany, Elizabthe Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck in Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
(2000)

“Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.  Will he gain by it?” ~M.K. Gandhi