GRIEF CAN'T BE FIXED

'Our culture is imbued with the belief that we can fix just about anything and make it better; or, if we can't, that it's possible to trash what you have and start all over again. Grief is the antithesis of this belief: it requires endurance, and forces us to accept that there are some things in this world that simply cannot be fixed.' 

Julia Samuel in Robert McCrum, Every Third Thought, p.201. 

FIGHTING DEATH

'I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.' 

Joseph Conrad in Robert McCrum, Every Third Thought: On Life, Death and the End Game, p.107. 

DON'T WAIT TO HAVE THE TIME

'The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.177.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF READING HISTORY

'A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.176.  

OUR APPETITES MATTER

'...God makes no appetite in vain...'
CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.175.  

WHAT MAKES WORK SPIRITUAL?

'The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly "as to the Lord."'  

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.175.  

EVERYTHING CAN BE WORSHIP

'All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of then, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organisation which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.174.  

WAR CHANGES LESS THAN WE THINK

'...war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on a precipice.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.172.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF TALKING ABOUT HEAVEN & HELL

'...to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must not be that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention heaven and hell even in a pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source was our Lord himself. People will tell you that it is St Paul, but that is untrue. These overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or his Church. If we do believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.171.  

WHEN THE CHURCH HAD POWER

'There was a time when the church was very powerful - in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators". But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were a "colony of heaven," called to obey God and not man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it an arch-defender of the status-quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent - and often even vocal - sanction of things as they are.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, p.24. 

THE POWER OF AN INJUSTICE

'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, p.2. 

THE POWER OF A SENTENCE OR TWO

'What I have learned from about twenty years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is oem new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don't begrudge the 99%!' 

John Piper in Tony Reinke, Lit! p.116. 

CHOOSING THE RIGHT BOOKS

'For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).' 

Tony Reinke, Lit! p.94

CHRISTIANITY & OTHER RELIGIONS

'All the elements and forms that are essential to religion (a concept of God, a sense of guilt, a desire for redemption., sacrifice, priesthood, temple, cult, prayer, etc.), though corrupted, nevertheless do also occur in pagan religions... Hence Christianity is not only positioned antithetically toward paganism; it is also paganism's fulfilment. Christianity is the true religion, therefore also the highest and purest; it is the truth of all religions. What in paganism is the caricature, the living original is here. What is appearance there is essence here. What is sought there can be found here.' 

Herman Bavnick in Tony Reinke, Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books, p.74. 

SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS

'There are those who become so involved in looking at the man-made lights of the city that they unconsciously forget to rise up and look at that great cosmic light and think about it - that gets up in the eastern hemisphere every morning and moves across the sky with a kind of symphony of motion and paints its technicolor across the blue - a light that man can never make. They become so involved in looking at the skyscraping buildings of the Loop of Chicago or Empire State Building of New York that they forget to think about the gigantic mountains that kiss the skies as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blue - something that man could never make. They have become so busy thinking about radar and their television that they unconsciously forget to think about the stars that bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity, those stars that appear to be shiny, silvery pins sticking in the magnificent blue pincushion. They become so involved in thinking about man's progress that they forget to think about the need for God's power in history. They end up going days and days not knowing that God is not with them.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE

'And don't forget in doing something for others that you have what you have because of others. Don't forget that. We are tied together in life and in the world. And you may think you got all you got by yourself. But you know, before you got out here to church this morning, you were dependent on more than half of the world. You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and you reach for a bar of soap, and that's handed to you by a Frenchman. You reach over for a sponge, and that's given to you by a Turk. You reach over for a towel, and that comes to your hand from the hands of a Pacific Islander. And then you go on to the kitchen to get your breakfast. You reach over to get a little coffee, and that's poured into your cup by a South American. Or maybe you decide that you want to drink a little tea this morning, only to discover that that's poured into your cup by a Chineses. Or maybe you want a little cocoa, that's poured in your cup by a West African. Then you want a little bread and you reach over to get it, and that's given to you by the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. Before you get through eating breakfast in the morning, you're dependent on more than half the world. That's the way God structured it; that's the way God structured this world. So let us be concerned about others because we are dependent on others.'  

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

THE GREATNESS OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN

'I say to you this morning that the first question that the priest asked was the first question that I asked on that Jericho Road of Atlanta known as Simpson Road. The first question that the Levite asked was, 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But the good Samaritan came by and he reversed the question. Not 'What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?' but 'What will happen to this man if I do not stop to help him?' This was why the man was good and great. He was great because he was willing to take a risk for humanity; he was willing to ask, 'What will happen to this man?' not 'What will happen to me?"

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

A CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO WORK

'...if it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say 'Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.'"

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.36.

KNOW THYSELF

'A Ford car trying to be a Cadillac is absurd, but if a Ford accepts itself as a Ford, it can do many things that A Cadillac could never do: it can get in parking spaces that a Cadillac can never get in. And in life some of us are Fords and some of us are Cadillacs.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.34.

THE CALVINIST BELIEF IN THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

'This apparent fatalism is actually confidence that life is shaped by divine intention, which will express itself in ways that can be baffling or alarming but that always bring an insight, pose a question, or make a demand, to the benefit of those who are alert to the will of God.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.100. 

OUR ETHICS SHOULD NOT BE LIMITED BY OUR CAPACITY

'Sigmund Freud said that we cannot love our neighbor as ourselves. No doubt this is true. But if the reality that lies behind the commandment, that our neighbor is as worthy of love as ourselves, and that in acting on this fact we would be stepping momentarily out of the bog of our own subjectivity, then a truth is acknowledged in the commandment that gives it greater authority than mere experience can refute. There is a truth that lies beyond our capacities. Our capacities are no standard or measure of truth, no ground of ethical understanding.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.100.