“It’s okay to wrestle with a biblical text, so long as at the end it masters you and not the other way around.”

Jared C. Wilson

Note: The post I had up earlier has been removed due to blogger incoherence. Thanks for the, “Your blog doesn’t make sense today” emails. Especially the “Your blog makes EVEN LESS sense today than usual.” Thank ye, thankee. Now you get this instead.

“When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.”

John Ruskin

“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages.

For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.

For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique.”

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

HT: JT

“As long as one is a Naturalist, ‘Nature’ is only a word for ‘everything’—And Everything is not a subject about which anything very interesting can be said or (save by illusion) felt. . . .

But everything becomes different when we recognize that Nature is a creature, a created thing, with its own particular tang or flavour. . . .

The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language well. In the same way and for the same reason, only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current.”

C.S. Lewis, Miracles

HT: JT

‎”Even if no command to pray had existed, our very weakness would have suggested it.”

Francois de Fenelon

HT: Scotty Smith

“In this story, the sun moves. In this story, every night meets a dawn and burns away in the bright morning. In this story, Winter can never hold back the Spring… He is the best of all possible audiences, the only Audience to see every scene, the Author who became a Character and heaped every shadow on Himself. The Greeks were right. Live in fear of a grinding end and a dank hereafter. Unless you know a bigger God, or better yet, are related to Him by blood.”

N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl

“It may, I think, even be argued that Communism in Russia, National Socialism in Germany, and Capitalism and Liberal Democracy in the Western countries are really three forms of the same thing, and that they are all moving by different but parallel paths to the same goal, which is the mechanization of human life and the complete subordination of the individual to the state and to the economic process.  Of course I do not mean to say that they are all absolutely equivalent, and that we have no right to prefer one to another.  But I do believe that a Christian cannot regard any of them as a final solution to the problem of civilization, or even as a tolerable one.  Christianity is bound to protest against any social system which claims the whole of man and sets itself up as the final end of human action, for it asserts that man’s essential nature transcends all political and economic forms.  Civilization is a road by which man travels, not a house for him to dwell in.  His true city is elsewhere.”

Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State, 1938

“Lust is the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst.”

Frederick Buechner

HT: Justin Taylor

“I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry. And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside. Run. He’s fuzzy. Get outta here. Gotta go.”

Mitch Hedberg