GENDER

'...maleness and femaleness forever defines an important aspect  of the relationship Christ has to all of us, his church. How our individual gender identities will play out in the eschaton is not revealed, but God wants us to forever think of our relationship with Jesus through a monogamous, male/female relational analogy.'  

Oliver O'Donovan in Mark A Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria, p.44. 

REST

'Elton worked hard and worried hard, and he was often in need of rest. But he had a restless mind, which meant that he could not rest on his own place in the presence of his own work. If he rested there, first he would begin to think about what he had to do, and then he would begin to do it.

To rest, he needed to be in somebody else's place.'

Wendell Berry, 'Are You All Right?' in That Distant Land, p.367. 

HUMANKIND

'...how should we think of ourselves? Well, the one word that comes to mind is that we are disordered. I think this word captures the human condition. However...I do not want the word to be used to focus in on certain experiences to the exclusion of our own disorder. In other words when we speak of being disordered, it should be noted that we share with one another this essential quality; we do not focus on the disorder of the other while overlooking our own disorder before a holy God.' 

Mark A Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture , p.41.  

FRIENDSHIP

'They enjoyed working together because they did not have to waste time in explanations.' 

Wendell Berry, 'A Friend of Mine' in That Distant Land, p.327. 

A DYING MAN

'Once he woke me to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. "Andy," he said. "Listen." He said the psalm to me. I lay listening to his old, slow voice coming through the dark to me, saying that he walked through the valley of the shadow of death and was not afraid. It stood my hair up. I had known that psalm all my life. I had heard it and said it a thousand times. But until then I had always felt that it came from a long way off, some place I had not lived. Now, hearing him speak it, it seemed to me for the first time to utter itself in our tongue and to wear our dust. My grandfather slept again after that, but I did not.' 

Wendell Berry, 'That Distant Land' in That Distant Land, p.313. 

DEATH

'It was, it would be truer to say, a great weariness that had come upon him, like the lesser weariness that comes with the day's end - a weariness that had been earned, and was therefore accepted.' 

Wendell Berry, 'That Distant Land' in That Distant Land, p.310. 

THE POWER OF DESIRE

'We are controlled in our world by an implicit affirmation that our desires are worth satisfying. Christians need to make the apologetic case that not all our desires are worth satisfying and many of them are conflicting ones. The greatest and deepest desires, for significance, for security, for eternity, can be satisfied only by being found in God's redemptive grace in Christ.' 

Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry, p.171. 

CHURCH GOVERNMENT

'Individuals do not govern the church - God does. We all need to be reminded that the major decisions facing the church have already been made.'

Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry, p.170. 

TRUE WORSHIP

'At the heart of worship is a sense of "giving yourself away" to another. Key to worship then are the questions "To whom are you giving yourself away and in what manner are you giving yourself?" Genuine worship is giving yourself to the living God in whom and for whom you have been created. Idolatry by contrast is substituting the true object of worship (God) for an imitation (idol) and re orientating the relationship from worship to possession.' 

Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry, p.156. 

HUMANKIND

'The gaols are full of blokes we'd swear are different to us. Only difference is, they did things you and me just thought about. 

That's still a big difference, said Rose. 

Maybe. A second's difference.' 

Tim Winton, Cloudstreet, p.408.