Words'nTone

“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization” ~Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), Prime Minister of France

Among all the books I read for work and study, I find time to read a few novels throughout the year as well. One of my favorite authors, William Martin, has just released City of Dreams, a great Summer time read. The three quotes below were worth posting, if for no other reason that Mr Martin almost word-for-word put in his story line things that my daughter, Amanda, has told me this year. She wants to be a historian and a history teacher. When I read Mr Martin’s words, I heard my daughter. She like, Martin’s main character, Peter Falon, wants to help others see “the shadows of the past as of it were still unfolding.” Enjoy the quotes and get City of Dreams for yourself—you will enjoy it.

“Sometimes she thought Peter had a pair of extra lenses in his sunglasses and whenever he wanted, he could flip them down like polarizing filters to remove the modern world, so that he could see the shadows of the past as if it were still unfolding” (p 108).

“He preferred books. Whenever he open some fancy Web site, he felt like the defender of a dying faith, a Roman pagan before the glowing presence of Christianity. If the march toward the electronization of everything from novels to newspapers continued, he’d have to start calling himself an antique dealer instead of a rare-book dealer, because the book would finally go the way of the buggy whip” (p 112).

“Just one of those tiny grains of sand in the great machinery of history” (p 117).

“Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The privilege of churches…can shroud the gospel in such middle- and upper-class consumer-oriented style and content that salvation subtly becomes more about providing a warm blanket of cultural safety than about stepping out into the bracing winds of spiritual sacrifice. Such patterns in a church’s life can easily, if unintentionally, lead to a focus on consolidating and extending power instead of identifying with the powerless. The former is a lot more like a comfortable bed to sleep in than the latter. No wonder we don’t want to wake up, let alone get up and get going in the work of justice” ~Mark Labberton in The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice, p 16

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience” ~C.S. Lewis

“All I care to know is that a Man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse” ~Mark Twain

“If you want to make enemies, try to change something” ~President Woodrow Wilson

“[Adam] Smith may be the patron saint of capitalism and neon-classical economics, but like all such saints his texts are used selectively by his devotees.  While commentators may disagree among themselves as to how Smith is to be read, there is no doubt that many modern economists and governments have made of ‘market forces’ a quasi-religious deity far more powerful than anything worshipped in pre-modern cultures.  And, in the name of that deity, they have thrown men and women out of work, added insult to injury by blaming the poor for their own poverty, justified the ruthless accumulation of wealth by a few, and squandered the earth’s non-renewable resources.  As ‘market forces’ increasingly encroach on every aspect of human life, human beings are reduced to ‘consumers’, human behavior to ‘self-interest’, human society to ‘competitive individuals’, and the worth of every human endeavor to ‘cost-effectiveness . . .” ~Vinoth Ramachandra, Gods That Fail: Modern Idolatry & Christian Mission

“The mission of the church is nothing more or less than the outworking, in the power of the Spirit, of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. It is the anticipation of the time when God will fill the earth with his glory, transform the old heavens and earth into the new, and raise his children from the dead to populate and rule over the redeemed world he has made… The split between saving souls and doing good in the world is not a product of the Bible or the gospel, but of the cultural captivity of both” ~N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

“The basic thesis is that mass publics respond to currently conspicuous political symbols: not to ‘facts’ and not to moral codes embedded in the character or soul, but to the gestures and the speeches that make up the drama of the state” ~Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action (1985 ed.)

“To live lives of faithful worship, to cultivate God’s imagination for justice, to trust Jesus Christ to do a work of liberation and transformation means there will be times when our noses will be filled with the stench of human need and evil.  But far more profoundly, we will also have glimpses of the glory of God that can set the capives free.  That’s God’s imagination” ~Mark Labberton, “Imagining Justice” (Prism 2007)

“The highest American good is more than the struggle over who gets what, when, and how. Politics has a community and justice dimension as well as a power dimension… If public opinion were not controlled by public philosophy, [Lippmann] argued, it would rarely be in the public interest. While it could truly express the voice of shifting voting groups, it must not be taken as the final verdict on a national issue. It was only the beginning of the argument” ~ Os Guinness, American Hour, 154-155

“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes—and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“There are more idols than realities in the world; that is my ‘evil eye’ for this world; that is also my ‘evil ear.’” ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen” ~Martin Luther, Diet of Worms, April 17, 1521