MY 2020 READING

For the first time since I was about 12 I've kept a record of all the books I finished in 2020. Those in bold are my top 10: 

January 

1. Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard 
2. Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity 
3. Brit Bennett, The Mothers: A Novel 
4. James M Hamilton Jr. Work and Our Labor in the Lord
5. Mary Oliver, Blue Horses 
6. Jan Morris, Conundrum 
7. Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods 
8. Pablo Martinez, Praying with the Grain: How Your Personality Affects The Way You Pray 
9. Chris Mullin, The Friends of Harry Perkins 
10. Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown

February 

1. Paul M Gould, Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience and Imagination in a Disenchanted World
2. Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance  
3. Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark 
4. John Mark Comer, Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human 
5. Richard Scott, Soho

March 

1. Emma Ineson, Ambition: What Jesus said about power, success and counting stuff 
2. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher - The Authorised Biography (Volume Three): Herself Alone
3. Philip Roth, Everyman 
4. Anne Lamott, Imperfect Birds 
5. David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life 
6. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels
7. William Fiennes, The Snow Geese

April 

1. Kate Fall, The Gatekeeper: Life at the Heart of No.10 
2. James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts 
3. William Maxwell, Billie Dyer and Other Stories
4. William Maxwell, Bright Center of Heaven 
5. Doug Worgul, Thin Blue Smoke
6. Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline 
7. Martin Boyd, A Difficult Young Man

May

1. Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter
2. Julian Hardyman, Fresh Pathways in Prayer 
3. Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
4. Randy Alcorn, Does God want Us to Be Happy? The Case for Biblical Happiness
5. Kenneth Rose, Who's In, Who's Out: Journals - Volume One, 1944-1979 (Edited by DR Thorpe)
6. Stewart O'Nan, Henry, Himself
7. HG Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
8. Kenneth Rose, Who Loses, Who Wins: Journals - Volume Two, 1979-2014 (Edited by DR Thorpe)
9. Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, minds, persons 
10. Frederick Buechner, The Son of Laughter

June

1. Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light 
2. Garth Greenwell, Cleanness
3. Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction 
4. Elliot Clark, Evangelism as Exiles: Life on mission as strangers in our own land 
5. Stewart O'Nan, Wish You Were Here 
6. Stewart O'Nan, Emily Alone

July 

1. Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment 
2. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
3. Martin Boyd, Outbreak of Love 
4. Ben Lindsay, We need to talk about race: understanding the black experience in white majority churches 
5. Martin Boyd, When Blackbirds Sing 
6. Tim Winton, The Turning 
7. Francis Spufford, Golden Hill 
8. Basil Macdonald Hastings, Memoirs of a Child 
9. Tim Winton, That Eye, The Sky
10. Adam Nicolson, The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and their year of marvels 
11. Tim Pears, The Horseman
12. Louisa M Alcott, Little Women 
13. John Williams, Butcher's Crossing

August 

1. Wesley Hill, The Lord's Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father 
2. Louisa M Alcott, Good Wives
3. Hermione Ranfurly, Hermione - After to War with Whitaker: the continuing diaries of Hermione Countess of Ranfurly 1945-2001
4. Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire 
5. Brandon Taylor, Real Life 
6. Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers 
7. Paul Mendez, Rainbow Milk 
8. Jo Ind, Memories of Bliss: God, Sex, and Us 
9. Max Hasting, Did You Really Shoot the Television? A Family Fable  

September 

1. Calvin Trillin, Remembering Denny 
2. Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose  
3. James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime 
4. Tim Pears, The Wanderers 
5. Veronique Mottier, Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction 
6. Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ: Paul's Gospel and Christian Moral Identity 
7. James Lees-Milne, The Fool of Love 
8. Tim Pears, The Redeemed
9. Arthur Ransome, Swallowdale

October

1. Sasha Swire, Diary of a MP's Wife: Inside and Outside Power
2. Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind 
3. Marilynne Robinson, Jack
4. Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle's Vision for Men and Women in Christ

November 

1. Arthur Ransome, Secret Water 
2. Paul David Tripp, Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church 
3. Lydia Davis, Break It Down: Stories 
4. Barack Obama, A Promised Land 

December 

1. Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half 
2. Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto
3. E Randolph Richards and Brandon J O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes
4. Beckett Cook, A Change of Affection: A Gay Man's Incredible Story of Redemption 
5. Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul: Fresh Pathways to Spiritual Passion 
6. Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night
7. Stewart O'Nan, The Good Wife
8. Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops 
9. Andrew O'Hagan, Mayflies 
10. James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance 
11. Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed
12. Will Young, To be a Gay Man 

THE GREAT MARRIAGE

'There will come the time, when Christ will sweetly invite his spouse to enter with him into the palace of his glory, which he had been preparing for her from the foundation of the world, and he shall as it were take her by the hand, and lead her in with him: and this glorious bridegroom and bride shall with all their shining ornaments, ascend up together into the heaven of heaven; the whole multitude of glorious angels waiting upon them: and this Son and daughter of God shall, in their united glory and joy, present themselves together before the Father; when Christ shall say "Here I am, and the children, which thou hast given me": and they both shall in that relation and union, together receive the Father's blessing; and shall thenceforward rejoice together, in consummate, uninterrupted, immutable, and everlasting glory, in the love and embraces of each other, and joint enjoyment of the love of the Father.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.87.

THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CREATION

'The whole outward creation, which is but the shadows of beings, is so made to represent spiritual things.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.79.

ALL OF LIFE IS SACRAMENTAL

'Edwards teaches us, then, of the God-centredness of all joy in this fallen world. He reminds us that the formula of joy is not God and _____ so much as God in _____. Christ is not one more element to fit into an already packed schedule - one more item on a growing list of priorities. Knowing Christ means seeing all of life in a new way, with new glasses. Jesus Christ gives meaning to all properties, not only heading the list but coloring every one with new and exciting meaning. To become a Christian is to make all of life sacramental. "From him and though him and to him are all things" (Rom.11:36). True joy derives not from God and job, family, sex, friends, food, rest, driving, buying a home, reading a book, drinking coffee - but from God in these things.'

Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.77.

ULTIMATE JOY

'Ultimate joy comes not from a lover or a landscape or a home, but through them...They point to what is "higher up" and "further back."'

Cornelius Plantinga in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.77.

THE ORTHODOXY OF THE DEVIL

'The devil is orthodox in his faith; he believes the true scheme of doctrine; he is no Deist, Socinian, Arian, Pelagian, or antinomian; the articles of his faith are all sound.'
Jonathan Edwards in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.67.

THE GOOD IN TRADITIONALISM

'The most traditional farmer in the district had the healthiest soil.'
James Rebanks, English Pastoral, p.144.

A HEALTHY WORK ETHIC

'He thought that pride in your work, no matter how modest the task, was the mark of a good man, so he mucked the cows out as if he were being judged on it every day.'
James Rebanks, English Pastoral, p.79.

THE DAMAGE REVOLUTIONS CAN DO

'The last forty years on the land were revolutionary and disrupted all that had gone on before for thousands of years - a radical and ill thought through experiment that was conducted on our fields.' 
James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance, p.6.

WHO ALL BEAUTY REFLECTS

'All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.27.

THE PURE FUN OF HOLINESS

'...there is nothing more thrilling, more solid, more exhilarating, more humanity-restoring, more radiantly joyous, than holiness.'
Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God, p.26.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF FOLLOWING A KING BORN IN A MANGER

'The manger at Christmas means that, if you live like Jesus, there won't always be room for you in a lot of inns.' 

Timothy Keller, Hidden Christmas, p.119. 

WHERE PLEASURE SHOULD LEAD US

'The Christian life is not an an ascetic life, but a life in which every received pleasure draws the mind up to supreme Pleasure, Christ himself, in his resplendent beauty. Joy is fundamentally a vision of God.' 

Dane Ortlund in Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.162.

THE LIMITS TO THE JOY OF SEX

'Human love knows no definitive consummation, no absolute fulfillment. Loving relationships are never complete. They are always ongoing, always reaching out for more. Regardless of the quality or frequency of lovemaking, there is always a measure of yearning present.' 

Dianne Bergant in Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.151.

CHRISTIAN BEAUTIFICATION

'Christian living is participation in God, in "the supreme loveliness of his nature". And if what defines God supremely is his beauty or loveliness or excellency, then to participate in the triune life of God is to be swept up into, and to exude that heavenly resplendence. A Christian is one who id being beatified.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.146.

THE TELESCOPE OF FAITH

'When you have a telescope, you can look through the wrong end (which makes everything look much further away than it is). Or you can look through the right end, and the distance is compressed for a moment. Too many of us have the telescope of faith turned the wrong way round, and Christ looks further away. Too many of us are so fixated on this life, particularly on what's not going well for us, with life's disappointments. The telescope is turned the other way, and heaven just seems further away even than it does without it. 

Song 5:1 makes us turn the telescope the right way around. Christ invites us to look at that day through the lens of this text and make it more real, more immediate. This text is intended to offer healing for our greyness and grumpiness. As we struggle in this life, we look through the telescope and we see the wedding feast, the perfect world and the glory that will be ours for all eternity. We see that we have not missed out on anything that matters because we are heading into the centre of the universe of all history to which marriage and sexuality point - and to which all singleness and unexpressed sexuality points to - the final climax of intimacy that will be ours in Christ.'

Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.104. 

MEETING JESUS

'To see Him will have an impact upon us similar to seeing and sensing all the most spectacular and precious sights and experiences added together. We may think of the most wonderful feeling of relief and gratitude we have ever experienced, when perhaps some terrible fear was removed. We may add to this the deepest sensation of love we have ever felt, and also the most humbling sense of awe and wonder.

Then we may add the greatest surge of excitement we have ever encountered, along with the most powerful thrill of triumph that ever swept over us. Finally, we may combine with all these the most profound amazement at breathtaking scenes of beauty and power that we have ever experienced. If we take all these magnificent impressions together, the very best of earthly sensations, magnified many times, we will have some small sense of the majesty and wonder of seeing Christ Jesus our Lord.' 

Peter Masters in Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.102.

MARRIAGE & THE BIBLE

'The marriage metaphor...keeps popping is again in the Bible like rocky granite outcrops revealing what underlies the whole landscape.'

Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.100.

WHAT JESUS SAYS TO HIS PEOPLE

'You have praised Me, I will praise you; you think much of Me, I think quite as much of you. You use great expressions for Me, I will use just the same for you. You say My love is better than wine, so is yours to Me. You tell Me all My garments smell of myrrh, so do yours. You say My word is sweeter than honey to your lips, so is yours to Mine; all that you say of Me, I say it to you. I see Myself in your eyes, I can see My own beauty in you. And whatever belongs to Me, belongs to you. Therefore, O My love, I will sing back the song - you have singing it to your beloved and I will sing it to My beloved. You have sung it your husband, I will sing it to My sister, My spouse.' 

Charles Spurgeon in Julian Hardyman, Jesus. Lover of My Soul, p.95.

JESUS' LOVELINESS

'Lovely in his person, lovely in his birth, and Incarnation, lovely in the whole course of his life, lovely in his Death, lovely in his whole employment, lovely in the glory and majesty, lovely in all these supplies of Grace, lovely in all the tender Care, Power and Wisdom, lovely in his Ordinances, lovely and glorious in the vengeance he takes, lovely in the pardon he has purchased, altogether lovely.'

John Owen in Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.51.

WHERE OUR DESIRES LEAD US

'Life is full of experiences that exhaust us with unsatisfied desire. We are driven to fill ourselves with the good things of this world, but they simply leave us needing God all the more. As they turn out to be unsatisfying, we find ourselves longing for more, not always realizing that it is Christ we are missing, but experiencing the craziness of desire to fill that space with love. That longing is a longing for the strengthening and refreshing that only Christ can bring. Every single earthly disappointment presses us towards him.'

Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.51.

WHERE CREATION POINTS US

'Every aspect of creation points in one way or another to some truth about God as he relates to us. Solid and dense though a mountain may be, it is like a shadow of the sheer vastness of God. The whole created order and the whole human world - real though they are, of course - were created to portray spiritual realities greater than themselves.'

Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul: Fresh Pathways to Spiritual Passion, p.11.

MINISTERIAL HUMILITY

'If it's possible to look at creation and not see the glory and presence of the one who created it all and controls it to this day, then it is also possible to look at your ministry and forget that every good thing there is the work of the hands greater than your own.' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.212.

LIMITS TO GRACE?

'Everybody believes in grace until a leader needs it.'
Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.180.

IDENTITY IS FOUND VERTICALLY NOT HORIZONTALLY

'Since the fall, people have looked horizontally for what they were designed to find vertically. They ask people, places and things to do for them what only identity in the Lord can.' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.164.

CHRISTIANITY IS COMMUNAL

'...an isolated, independent, separated, and self-hiding Christian life is alien to the Christianity of the New Testament. Biblical Christianity is thoroughly and foundationally relational. No one can live outside the essential ministries of the body of Christ and remain spiritually healthy.' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.148.

DON'T IGNORE THE WARNING SIGNS

'...whenever there is a public fall of a well-known leader, my first question is, "Why didn't the surrounding leadership community see it and address it before it got to this horrible place?" I ask because there are a couple of assumptions that seem safe to make. First, you know the leader has changed because if he had been in the early days who he now is, he would never have been called, hired, or appointed to the leadership position. Second, the changes did not occur overnight. They happened in bits and pieces over a period of years. This means that there are not only many evidences of a shift taking place in his life, but a growing body of evidence of a shift in heart sensitivities and heart allegiances.' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.110.

IDOLATRY IN MINISTRY IS MINISTRY

'Here's the scary reality. In ministry, the way you pursue your idols is by doing ministry. This reality should be in the thoughts and conversations of every ministry leadership community.' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.90.

LEADERSHIP - ACCOUNTABILITY = DISASTER

'...it is my experience, as I have dealt with fallen or lapsed pastors, that around them was a weak or dysfunctional community that failed, in pastoral love and care, to protect that leader from himself.' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.83.

A CALL TO CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP IS A CALL TO SUFFER

'...when God gives you ministry and leadership gifts, he is calling you to be willing to suffer. Because of your gifts you will suffer a kind and severity of temptation that others don't face. Because of the public nature of your gifts, you will suffer dangerous adulation and harsh criticism. The demands of your ministry life will tempt you to neglect your own personal devotional life. That attractiveness of public ministry will tempt you to neglect the private ministry of marriage, family, and friendship. Your gifts will tempt you to be demanding, irritable, and impatient with people of lesser gifts or who happen to be in the way of what you want. You will be tempted to confuse your giftedness with your level of spiritual maturity. Yes, it is true: your gifts mean you have been called to suffer for the sake of the giver and what he intends to do through you (see 2 Cor.1:3-11).' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.76.

A DANGER OF MINISTRY SUCCESS

'Sadly achievement can turn humble servant leaders into proud, controlling, and unapproachable mini-kings.' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead, p.49.

HOW THE GOSPEL SHOULD TRANSFORM LEADERSHIP

'Because of what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ, our leadership communities have been freed to be the most honest communities on earth. We are free to confess weakness because Jesus is our strength. We are free to confess failure because all of our failures have been covered by his blood. We are freed from taking credit for what God only can produce. We are free to respectfully disagree with one another because we get our identity and security from our Lord and not from one another. We are free to confess wrong attitudes toward and against one another because grace allows us to reconcile. We are freed from the allure of power and position because we have been freed from looking horizontally for what can only be found vertically. And we are free, because of Christ's work, to talk about these things and confess how we struggle with them.' 

Paul David Tripp, Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church, p.41.

DISCLESHIP IS ALLEGIANCE

'Discipleship is fundamentally a call to allegiance.'
Darrell L Bock, Luke 9:51-24:53, p.1284.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'"All right, I'll tell you. I'm a gifted thief. I lie fluently, often for no reason. I'm a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of . I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile, with the thought that I must and will break it. This has been true of me my whole life. I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do. And here I am with a wife! Of whom I know more than you have any hint of, to whom I could do a thousand kinds of harm, never meaning to...'"

Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.228.

HOPING FOR THE MIRACULOUS TO BREAK IN PERMANENTLY

'Miracles leave no trace. He had decided, hearing his father preach on the subject, that they happened once as a sort of commentary on the blandness and inadequacy of the realty they break in on, and then vanish, leaving a world behind that refutes the very idea that such a thing could have happened...he sat down on a bench with his hat beside him and thought what it might be like if the miraculous became the natural order of things. Loaves and fishes in inexhaustible supply. Troops of Lazaruses putting off their cerements. Infinite hours where Della was always waiting for him, and he was always somehow not a disappointment.' 

Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.219.

UNCHRISTIAN SILENCE

'I have seen religious leaders stand amid the social injustices that pervade our society, mouthing pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. All too often the religious community has been a tailgate instead of a headlight.' 

Martin Luther King Jr. in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead, p.167. p. 100.

CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP IS MORE FEMALE THAN MALE?

'Paul notably finds that women provide a better model for apostolic leadership than the typical male model of leadership in the Greco-Roman culture, which he indicates is characterized by flattery, greed, people-pleasing, and a lack of gentleness.'

Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle's Vision for Men and Women in Christ, p.222.

PREDESTINATION IS JUST GRACE BEGINNING EARLIER

'"Salvation by grace alone. It just begins earlier for us than other people. In the deep womb of time, in fact. By his secret will and purpose."'
Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.39.

THE AUDACITY OF CHRISTIANITY

'To be a Christian is to believe that God became man, and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it - the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe - that serves to explain more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.524.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONS

'Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberated across the world. First there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by St Paul. There there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century that set Latin Christendom upon its momentous course; the revolution commemorated as the Reformation; the revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold within their embrace every other possible way of seeing the world; the claim to a universalism that was culturally highly specific. That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution; these were never self-evident truths.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.523,

THE ROLE OF WOIMEN IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

'I have written so much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.519.

#MeToo & CHRISTIANITY

'Implicit in #MeToo was the same call to sexual continence that has reverberated throughout the Church's history. Protestors who marched in the red cloaks of handmaids were summoning men to exercise control over their lusts just as the Puritans had done. Appetites that had been hailed by enthusiasts for sexual liberation as Dionysiac stood condemned once again as predatory and violent. The human body was not an object, not a commodity to be used by the rich and powerful as and when they pleased. Two thousands years of Christian sexual morality had resulted in men as well as women widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.515.

BOTH SIDES IN THE CULTURE WARS ARE CHRISTIAN

'That the great battles in America's culture war were being fought between Christians and those who had emanicipated themselves from Christianity was a conceit that both sides had an interest in promoting. It was no less a myth for that. In reality, Evangelicals and progressives were both recognisably bred of the same matrix. If opponents of abortion were the heirs on Macrina, who had toured the rubbish tips of Cappadocia looking for abandoned infants to rescue then those who argued against them were likewise drawing on a deeply rooted Christian supposition: that every woman's body was her own, and to be respected as such by every man. Supporters of gay marriage were quite as influenced by the Church's enthusiasm for monogamous fidelity as those against it were by biblical condemnations of men who slept with men. To install transgender toilets might indeed seem an affront to the Lord God, who had created male and female; but to refuse kindness to the persecuted was to offend against the most fundamental teaching of Christ. In a country as saturated in Christian assumptions as the United Sates, there could be no escaping their influence - even for those who imagined that they had. America's culture wars were less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.514.

HOW CHRISTIANITY ITSELF UNDERMINES CHRISTIAN ARROGANCE

'Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, has so successfully persuaded people around the globe that it possessed a universal import.'

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.487.

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS?

'That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy that to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christianity and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinist and Quakers, that every human being was created in God's image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic - no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think - was the book of Genesis.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.384.

TRUE CHRISTIAN UNITY

'...the expression of true unity is not necessarily about the absence of conflict but about the proper evaluation of those whom we have dismissed as "lesser."'

Grant Macaskill, Living with Union with Christ, p.92.

UNION WITH CHRIST DRIVES SEXUAL ETHICS

'...the problem with sexual immorality is precisely that it is incompatible with the holiness associated with the believer in union with Christ. It actively defiles the sacred.'
Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ, p.89.

IDENTITY SHAPED BY MEMORY

'Our identities are very closely linked to our memories. Who we are is shaped by what we remember because our identity is, at least in part, narratival, and our memories constitute our story.' 

Grant Macaskill, Living in Uniion with Christ, p,73.

BAPTISM & UNION WITH CHRIST

'...baptism signifies that the Christian life involves donning the identity of someone else and not simply improving our own. What we clothe ourselves with is not a new set of attitudes or practices but another person, Jesus Christ.'
Grant Macaskill, Living with Union in Christ, p.71.

THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTIAN UNITY

'We frequently approach Christian unity as something that follows from what we are or what we do: we see Christian unity as constituted by doctrinal agreement or by moral alignment. We consider there to be no meaningful between someone who takes a different position on this or that doctrinal issue or this or that moral position. The way we approach evangelical ethics often reflects this. Even if we have a good emphasis on unity, it is often understood as an imperative modeled on Jesus' willingness to love the other, which still needs a move toward agreement by dialogue. But proper reflection on the sacraments confounds this: for Paul, our unity is a function of our union with Christ, which is a union with the one God, whose oneness becomes ours. Our attempts to draw a circle around those who think like us is fundamentally wrongheaded and, frankly, sinful. Now, this is not to say that it is wrong to pursue moral and theological agreement in the truth; it is important to do so, but we do it to bring the highest glory to God, not to define who is in and who is out. I am united to the believer whose doctrine is dreadful and to those whose life I find abhorrent; it is precisely because they share in Christ's body that I am compelled to speak to both problems, but to do so in brotherly love and affirmation. For Paul, the sine qua non of inclusion seems to be limited to the confession "Jesus is Lord," which can be made only by the acting presence of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor.12:3).'

Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ, p.70.

OUR IDOLATRY PROBLEM

'...we are constitutionally idolatrous...'
Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ, p.8.

CHEAP WORDS?

'Although we throw the word "sin" around easily and often, especially within evangelicalism, we do not take seriously enough the extent to which it will afflict and subvert our piety - both our practice and our doctrine - if it is not always challenged by the gospel.'
Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ, p.7.

OUT OF TUNE EVANGELICALISM?

'For various historical reasons - good reasons, at that - evangelicals from diverse backgrounds have committed themselves collectively to defending certain truths in the face of their critics. But while we have maintained these notes carefully and sounded them loudly, gaining a sense along the way of what we hold in common that is distinctively "evangelical," we have allowed other truths to fall into silence. Our ability to sound those other notes where appropriate has been lost. At some point, we must ask ourselves whether we are still playing the original tune or are, perhaps without recognizing it, playing something else, something different. Have we sounded certain good notes so loudly and exclusively that they have come to constitute a different melody? Have we lost so much from our theological scales that what we proclaim is, in fact, a different gospel, much as Paul speaks of somethings as a "different gospel" in Gal.3:16?'

Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ: Paul's Gospel and Christian Moral Identity, p.5.

GRADUAL SANCTIFICATION

'...it pleases God gradually to restore his image in us, in such a manner that some taint always remains in our flesh.' 

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.20.25 (Editor John T McNeill), p.911.

IRRATIONAL SEXUALITY

'...sexual interactions do not constitute the most rational area of most individuals' lives.'

Veronique Mottier, Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction, p.84.

THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL OF DECISION MAKING

'One of the things I am always telling my children is that doing the right thing often comes with painful consequences. We like to believe in a sort of prosperity gospel of decision making: if you do the right thing, blessings follow. Life will be the way you think you deserve. However, doing the right thing often comes with the pain of self-discipline, as well as consequences such as being left out, rejected, or as we see with the early church, persecuted.'

Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, p.201. 

JESUS VALUES WOMEN

'Jesus values women. Women will travel with him, provide for him and his ministry, be healed by him, turn a whole town of enemies to him, and witness the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. Women will be the first to share the gospel to the apostles and enter the upper room with them to pray. They will prophecy, plant the first churches with the apostles, help correct evangelists, co labor with the men in gospel work, host churches, and hand-deliver Scripture.'

Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, p.187.

THE MYSTERY OF SEXUALITY

'Sexuality can point us to God or it can lead us to an inner hell. It cam be an all-compasing force or it can disappear altogether. It is both enduring and ephemeral, earthy and mystical, universal and peculiarly our own., We can study sex for years, enjoy it for a lifetime, think about it right to the edges of our brains, but we never really take hold of it. We do not grasp. We glimpse.' 

Jo Ind, Memories of Bliss, p.153. 

WHY SEX IS SUCH A TEMPTING IDOL

'It is very tempting to make an idol out of sex, especially as sex can at its best, bring us the nearest many of us get to heaven in this lifetime.'

Jo Ind, Memories of Bliss: God, Sex, and Us, p.142. 

WHAT I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO

'...one day God is going to walk us through the wardrobe into Narnia, and we will stand there, paralyzed with joy, wonder, astonishment, and relief.'

Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly, p.209. 

THE MEANING OF LIFE

'The creation of the world seems to have been especially for this end, that the eternal Son of God might obtain a spouse, towards whom he might fully exercise the infinite benevolence of his nature, and to whom he might, as it were, open and pour forth all that immense fountain of condescension , love, and grace that was in his heart, and this in this way God might be glorified.'

Jonathan Edwards in Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly, p.206.

JESUS DIED OF A BROKEN HEART

'In the presence of this mental anguish, the physical tortures of the crucifixion retire into the background, and we may well believe that our Lord, though he died on the cross, yet died not of the cross, but, as we commonly say, of a broken heart.'

BB Warfield in Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly, p.200. 

THE AWFUL THING ABOUT BEAUTY

'The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes the truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone.

A good body is a monstrous thing; it stalks and hunts us in the smallest parts of ourselves. It extracts from us painful truths. When Wallace sees a good body, what he feels is thirst, or else an ache, which is the sensation of beauty forcing its way inside.' 

Brandon Taylor, Real Life, p.269. 

WHITE BIAS IN CALLING OUT RACISM

'The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It's unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effect. They are the fox in the henhouse.' 

Brandon Taylor, Real Life, p.97.

WANTS BIND US TO GOD

'Wants are the bands and ligatures between God and us.'

Thomas Traherne in Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.169. 

THE MONETIZATION OF HUMAN DESIRE

'Everyone alive right now has grown up with the compensatory low-grade commercial seductions that go with the incessant monetization of human desire. These seductions have set out to undermine (in passing, not in malice) the projects of fidelity, kindness, understanding, sustained attention, self-discipline and self-knowledge, because dissatisfaction, outrage, a short attention span and emotional incontinence make sales and contentment doesn't.' 

Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.167. 

WHERE DESIRE POINTS US

'Conversion means that people change their direction, not their character or their history. Desire, that constant reminder that there is something beckoning beyond any immediate horizon, is there to be re-purposed: it is not there to be torn out or thrown away or violently bent out of shape. The flowering of desire in the human soul is a herald for God's presence, because desire points towards something we have not made for ourselves and cannot encompass. It speaks God's truth: that the perfectly regulated and performed self is not, in fact, available to anyone. Neither the religious not the secular closed self can thrive.

For those who recognize that they are dependent animals - creatures - this is not such a terrible shock.'

Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.166. 

THE DANGER OF GENDER STEREOTYPING WHEREVER IT HAPPENS

'...when some Christian communities try to inscribe and fix "essential" qualities of male and female - male leadership, female nurture, all the rest of it - and set up a theology around it, it looks remarkably like a version of the same old gendered oppression that secular culture already imposes upon the development of its children, giving away their joy, comfort, health and physical confidence as necessary sacrifices to the monetization of desire. I don't suppose anyone "means" to do harm. But given that we are all soaked in this toxic stuff from birth to the grave, there's no easy way out. Not for anyone. Quasi-separatist Christian cultures are no more immune than anyone else.'

Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.140. 

THE INTIMACY OF GOOD FICTION

'Fiction, if it's doing it work, will always, I've suggested, take us deeper into connectedness. And in a fiction that works with with and is inspired by Christian themes, we are taken into the deepest connectedness of all: in the light and in hope of which we live and pray for one another.' 

Rowan Williams in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead, p.167. 

THE ROOT PROBLEM?

'The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God's own insistence on who he is... The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan's greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God's heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.'

Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly, p.151. 

WHY THE REFORMERS STRESSED PREDESTINATION

'The reason that all the Reformers foregrounded predestination in the way that they do is because they're arguing against the idea, prevalent then, that the church had the means of salvation - that if you do thus and so, you will be saved. The Reformers believed that the church had put a certain ritualized idea of salvation in the place of God. And to move people back toward the idea of omnipotence, divine omnipotence, the Reformers sought to end what they saw as perhaps a corrupt cycle of spending money, doing things that were intended as acts which would insure your salvation. And so, the doctrine of predestination really is a way of making the argument that it is God that determines these issues and not any human institution.' 

Marilynne Robinson in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, p.210.

HUMANITIES HUMANIZE

'The humanities humanize. They are well named.'

Marilynne Robinson in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, p.208.

THE IMPORTANCE OF IMAGINATION IN PASTORAL CARE

'I think one of the most important things for people to do is to develop imagination in the sense of a sympathetic imagination. There are some people who can comfort you and some people who can't. And to be the good comforter, you have to be somebody who has a felt imagination for the circumstance of the person being comforted. 

Marilynne Robinson in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, p.204.

WE WANT TO BE KNOWN

'Behind all the desires for connection is the desire to be "fully known"'

Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.78. 

PORN IS FOR SUNDAYS

'Friday is the day of lowest use, because people have things to do together in their lives. Patterns for watching porn reflect patterns of being alone with your smartphone. It is something for times of emptiness. Porn's most popular watching day, therefore, is Sunday.' 

Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.69. 

HEAVEN IS HERM

'Herm was the best place we could ever imagine and I'm afraid that, when the mater used to tell us about Heaven and how we must try hard to get there, nearly all of us were wondering whether if it was really a patch on Herm.' 

Basil Macdonald Hastings, Memoirs of a Child, p.103. 

YOUR WILL BE DONE

'In petitionary prayer, we set ourselves against what seems "normal." If a world filled with cancer, AIDS, sex slavery, rapacious greed, and toxic waste seems to us like "just the way things are," then petitionary prayer invites us to imagine a different world - the world as God meant it to be and will ultimately make it, a world in which those things are profoundly abnormal. To pray "Your will be done" is to adopt an appropriate distress over the world as it exists now and to hold on to the conviction that God will even now begin to change the world.' 

Wesley Hill, The Lord's Prayer, p.42.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE TODAY

'We are waiting until Easter becomes for this world a general event.'

Karl Barth in Wesley Hill, The Lord's Prayer: A Guide to Praying Our Father, p.37.

WHERE IS GOD?

'"So God's up there? I say, pointing to all those wonderful stars. "A someone?"
"Everywhere, Ort. He's everything. The trees, the ground, the water. Everything stinks of God, reeks of him."'
Tim Winton, That Eye, The Sky, p.89.

MISLEADING BOOK TITLES

'So few books fulfill the promise of their titles that experienced readers never expect the fare to come up to the menu.'

Edith Wharton, 'Expiation' in The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, p.195.

JESUS IS NOT ZEUS

'Jesus is not Zeus.'

Dane Ortlund , Gentle and Lowly, p.47. 

MIRACLES ARE NATURAL NOT UNNATURAL

'When Jesus expels demons and heals the sick, he is driving out of creation the powers of destruction, and is healing and restoring created beings who are hurt and sick. The lordship of God to which the healings witness, restores creation to health. Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly "natural" thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.' 

Jurgen Moltmann in Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers,  p.31. 

THE MORAL EMOTION

'...anger is always makes a value judgement. Anger is always a moral matter. It has rightly been called "the moral emotion" because it makes a statement about what matters. Human beings make moral judgments, therefore human beings do anger. Period. Like God, you come wired to size things up, to feel displeasure at wrong, and to act in order to do something about it.' 

David Powlison, Good & Angry, p.41. 

THE SIMPLICITY OF ANGER

'At its core anger is very simple. It expresses "I'm against that."' 

David Powlison, Good & Angry: Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining, and Bitterness, p.39. 

PROOF OF LOVE

'There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognised.'

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p.80.  

WE NO LONGER POSTPONE ANY DESIRES

'According to Freud, the full and uninhibited satisfaction of all instinctual desires would create mental health and happiness. But the obvious clinical facts demonstrate that men - and women - who devote their lives to unrestricted sexual satisfaction do not attain happiness, and very often suffer from severe neurotic conflicts or symptoms. The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity. Yet Freud's idea could only have become popular in the period after the First World War because of the changes which had occurred in the spirit of capitalism, from the emphasis on saving to that on spending, from self-frustration as a means for economic success to consumption as the basis for an ever-widening market, and as the main satisfaction for the anxious, automatised individual. Not to postpone the satisfaction of any desire became the main tendency in the sphere of sex as well as in that of all material consumption.'   

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 72. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF THINKING WELL OF GOD

'...retain good thoughts of God, take heed of judging God to be a hard master, make good interpretations of his ways, and that is a special means to help you to contentment in all one's course.'  

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.225. 

DROWNING SUFFERING

'The sea of God's mercies should swallow up all our particular affections.'
Martin Luther in Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.209. 

OUR DESIRE FOR COMPLETION

'Man - of all ages and cultures - is confronted with the solution of one and the same question: the question of how to overcome separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one's own individual life and find at-onement.' 

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p.8. 

HOLINESS

'Holiness...is the necessary effect and means of the gospel. In other words, holiness is not only the result of conversion, it's also the embodied argument in support of the gospel's veracity. We're saved to be holy, and we become holy so others will be saved.' 

Elliot Clark, Evangelism as Exiles: Life on mission as strangers in our own land, p.115. 

A SINGLE TEACHER'S LEGACY

'She had more children than any of her friends, and been loved and respected, fawned over and feared. She'd taught thousands of young people to read and think, and they had gone on to change the world and would continue to long after she was dust.' 

Stewart O'Nan, Wish You Were Here, p.315. 

HOW YOU REST DEPENDS ON HOW YOU WORK

'A man who works with his mind should sabbath with his hands, and a man who works with his hands should sabbath with his mind.' 

Abraham Heschel in Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule, p.142. 

VULNERABILITY + TIME = FRIENDSHIP

'Vulnerability and time turn people who have relationship into a people who have a friendship. That's what friendship is: vulnerability across time. The practice of conversation is the basis of friendship because it's in the conversation that we become exposed to each other.' 

Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule, p.98. 

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU'RE NOT TELLING ME?

'The question "Is there anything you aren't telling me?" gets at the heart of friendship, because friendship is being known by someone else and loved anyway. Friendships in which we're vulnerable make or break lives. Within them we thrive, and without them an essential part of us - if not all of us - dies.' 

Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule, p.96. 

THE FIRST STEP IN EVANGELISM

'...one of the main things our neighbors who don't know Jesus need is simply to trust a Christian.'

Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction, p.59. 

THE NEWS

'All information that comes in, if it is fresh, is wrong; if it is stale, it is possibly accurate, but also useless.' 

Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light, p.324. 

THE ONLY SOURCE OF HUMAN SATISFACTION

'...the reasons why you have not got contentment in the things of the world is not because you have not got enough of them - that is not the reason - but the reason is, because they are not things proportionate to that immortal soul of yours that is capable of God himself.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.91. 

WHERE GOOD SEXUAL ETHICS ARE TO BE FOUND

'I suspect that a fuller exploration of the sexual metaphors of the Bible will have more to teach us about a theology and ethics of sexual desire than will the flat citation of isolated texts; and I hope other theologians will find this worth following up more fully than I can do here.' 

Rowan Williams, 'The Body's Grace' in Theology and Sexuality (Ed.: Rogers), p.320. 

THE QUESTION SAME-SEX LOVE POSES

'Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is - in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process, such as the peopling of the world.' 

Rowan Williams, 'The Body's Grace' in Theology and Sexuality (Ed.: Rogers), p.318. 

SEXUAL ETHICS GONE WRONG

'It has often been said, especially by feminist writers, that the making of my body into a distant and dangerous object that can be either subdued or placated with quick gratification is the root of sexual oppression. If my body isn't me, then the desiring perception of my body is bound up with an area of danger and foreignness, and I act toward whatever involves me in desiring and being desired with fear and hostility.'

Rowan Williams, 'The Body's Grace' in Theology and Sexuality (Ed.: Rogers), p.315. 

THE GOOD IN SEXUAL SIN?

'...an absolute declaration that every sexual partnership must conform to the pattern of commitment or else have the nature of sin and nothing else is unreal and silly. People do discover - as does Sarah Layton - a grace in encounters fraught with transitoriness and without much "promising" (in any sense): it may be just this that prompts them to want the fuller, longer exploration of the body's grace that faithfulness offers. Recognizing this - which is no more recognizing the facts of a lot of people's histories, heterosexual or homosexual, in our society - ought to be something we can do without generating anxieties about weakening or compromising the focal significance of commitment and promise in our Christian understanding and "moral imagining" of what sexual bonding can be.'  

Rowan Williams, 'The Body's Grace' in Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Edited by Eugene F Rogers Jr.), p.315. 

SUFFERING IS BETTER THAN SIN

'Sin is often thought of as being motivated by the temptation for pleasure. But perhaps the real power of sin lies in the avoidance of pain and suffering. It is better to suffer unfulfilled needs and desires than to sin. Is this not what self-denial means?' 

Karen H Jobes, 1 Peter: Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, p.5. 

CLAIMING OUR INHERITANCE

'...when you look into the book of God and find any promise there, you may make it your own; just as an heir who rides over a lot of fields and meadows says. This meadow is my inheritance, and this corn field is my inheritance, and the he sees a fine house, and says, This fine house is my inheritance. He looks at them with a different eye from a stranger who rides over those fields. A carnal heart reads the promises, and reads them merely as stories, not that he has any great interest in them. But every time a godly man reads the Scriptures (remember this when you are reading the Scripture) and there meets a promise, he ought to lay his hand upon it and say, This is part of my inheritance, it is mine, and I am to live upon it.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.83. 

THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE CONTENTMENT THE SCRIPTURES PROVIDE

'There is no condition that a godly man or woman can be in, but there is some promise or other in the Scripture to help him in that condition. And that is the way of his contentment, to go to the promises, and get from the promise, that which may supply.'

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.69. 

THANKFULNESS IN SMALL THINGS

'Every bit of bread you eat, if you are a godly man or woman, Jesus Christ has bought it for you. You go to the market and buy your meat and drink with your money, but know that before you buy it, or pay money, Christ has bought it at the hand of God the Father with his blood. You have it at the hands of men for money, but Christ has bought it at the hand of his Father by his blood. Certainly it is a great deal better and sweeter now, though it is but a little.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.59. 

THE SECRET OF CONTENTMENT

'...I know nothing more effective for quieting a Christian soul and getting contentment than this, setting your heart to work in the duties of the immediate circumstances that you are in, and taking heed of your thoughts about other conditions as a mere temptation.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.52. 

BETTER AFFLICTION THAN PROSPERITY?

'You do not find one godly man who came out of affliction worse than he went into it; though for a while he was shaken, yet at last he was better for the affliction. But a great many godly men, you find, have been worse for their prosperity.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, A Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.50. 

GOD ALONE SATIFIES

'A soul that is capable of God can be filled with nothing else but God; nothing but God can fill a soul that is capable of God.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.43. 

CONTENTMENT IN SUFFERING

'...contentment, the mingling of joy and sorrow, of gracious joy and gracious sorrow together. Grace teaches us how to moderate and to order an affliction so that there shall be a sense of it, and yet for all that contentment under it.' 

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.41.

A GOOD SERMON INTRODUCTION

'I began that sermon by quoting Winnie the Pooh (which is a great temptation on many occasions).' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.101. 

WHY WE NEED THE SOUND OF SILENCE

'...moments of silence, silence imposing itself on us, are so very important not only for our humanity in general because we habitually live in a world where the "right thing"to do with critical moments is to stop them being critical. The right thing to do with a wild animal is to tame it, so to speak, and the right thing to do with any "wild" experience is to work out what I can do with it, what I can make of it, and, in short, domesticate it.'...

A growing humanity, a maturing humanity, is one that's prepared for silence, because it's prepared at important moments to say "I can't domesticate, I can't get on top of this."'

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.91. 

WHAT MAKES DEPENDENCE ON GOD DIFFERENT

'To be unconditionally dependent on another human subject is to be in deep danger of repressive, dehumanizing patterns of relation. To depend on God in the context I have outlined is precisely to be delivered from this. God is not another ego greedy to control.'

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.83. 

AN UNTOLD STORY OF OUR TIME

'Increasingly, one of the marks of a fully and uncompromisingly secular environment is the notion of undifferentiated time. There are, for mature late capitalism, no such tings as weekends. The problem with this kind of secularism is not so much a denial of the existence of God as the denial of the possibility of leisure - of time that is not spent serving the market. That is to say, for a particular mindset, acquisitive and purpose-driven, the passage of time is precisely the slipping away of a scarce, valuable commodity, every moment of which has to be made to yield its maximum possible result, so you can't afford to stop. This kind of secular understanding of the passage of time is perhaps one of those areas where there is most open collision between the fundamentally religious and the fundamentally anti-religious mindset - and I think that's one of the untold stories of our time.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.78. 

THE GOOD DIFFICULTY DOES

'I think difficulty is good for us, and I say that not just as an excuse for writing some of the books I've written, which I'm told are not always easy reading. I say it because difficulty is one of those things that, rather obviously, obliges us to take time. The more time we take, the more our discovery is likely to turn into habit and into inhabiting. The less time we take over something, the easier we find something to resolve, map and digest, the less value, the less significance it will have. It's a rather old chestnut: Platonic philosophers and early Christian theologians were saying millennia back that the more easily you thought you'd got to know something, the less you'd care about it. Difficulty imposes discipline: it imposes the willingness to believe tat there is more to work on. And by reminding us that getting to where we are has taken time, it can also be one of the things that reminds us that our current cultural perspective, temporal or geographical, is not the obvious one. Taking time, the awareness of the "more" that we have not yet absorbed, may be one of the things (may be, but doesn't need to be) making us that little bit more patient with the criticism, the challenge, the alternative view, of another world, another culture, another person. It may be one of those things that builds solidarity rather than division, something, in other words, that extends the cooperation that properly belongs to knowledge.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.64. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPATHY

'Empathy. that is,the imaginative identification with a perspective that is not my own, is not just an optional extra in our human identity and our human repertoire, it's something without which we cannot know ourselves. Without identification with the other, I don't know myself.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.58. 

OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD DEFINES, AND DIGNIFIES, US ALL

'...when I look around, my neighbour is also always somebody who is already in relation with God before they're in relation with me. That means that there's a very serious limit on my freedom to make of my neighbour what I choose, because, to put it very bluntly, they don't belong to me, and their relation to me is not all that is true of them, or even the most important thing that is true of them.' 

Rowan Williams, Being Human: Bodies, minds, persons, p.37.

GOD'S FORGIVENESS IS THE MOST READILY AVAILABLE FORGIVENESS

'The good news is that it's easier to be restored to a positive relationship with God than with any other being. As difficult as this is to grasp, when we do, it's happiness making in the extreme.' 

Randy Alcorn, Does Want Us to Be Happy? p.110.  

JOY = HAPPINESS

'The notion that we can have joy without happiness has perverted the meaning of both words and helped spawn a culture of Christian curmudgeons. Feeling morally superior, they may affirm that they have the joy of Jesus deep in their hearts, but apparently it's so deep it never makes the way to their faces.' 

Randy Alcorn, Does God Want Us to Be Happy? p.48. 

THE DANGER OF JUST FOLLOWING YOUR DESIRES

'The most dangerous thing you can do is take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.' 

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.10. 

THE BURDEN OF SELF-CONSTRUCTION

'Modern notions of selfhood amplify our individual responsibilities and opportunities in this regard. In former times, when prevalent mental frameworks sealed the individual within an envelope of community, mapping the world was more of a shared effort. Today, imagining ourselves to be autonomous, we shoulder the burden of psychic self-construction in relative isolation. It must have been far less taxing to assume one's place in the choir than it is to improvise these solos.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.61. 

THE ESSENCE OF ART

'What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.' 

Carl Jung in Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.155. 

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

'...constructing an identity is not a self-contained project. One's sense of self is a fluctuating assemblage of beliefs and feelings strongly influenced by external circumstances, especially the beliefs of other people.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.67. 

READING/ WRITING SOMETHING VS. CREATING/ APPRECIATING AN OBJECT OF ART

'Reading text is a linear progression where one idea follows another like the news crawl at the bottom of a television screen. On the positive side, this gives a writer significant control of the step-by-step process through which a reader accesses ideas. On the downside, only one thought can be presented at a time.The remainder of the author's composition is either receding into the netherworld of memory or invisibly waiting in the wings for its moment on stage. In contrast, a craft object, is a collage in which many pieces and levels of information are read in relationship to each other in the present...A craftsman cannot control a respondent's path through this information as tightly as as an author, but the craftsman has the advantage of making complex structures of information simultaneously apparent. His picture is worth the proverbial thousand words.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.64. 

CREATIVITY AS A COMMUNICATION EXERCISE

'We are socially embraided to such an extent that the architecture of our thoughts is a communal construction. Anything I create becomes a doorway through which others can access my ideas and concerns, if they care to.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.63. 

TANGIBLE ACHIEVEMENTS

'The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect on the world. But craftmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failure or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.' 

Matthew Crawford in Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.56. 

IN THE ZONE

'Through personal experience, acquaintance with hundreds of other craftspeople, and interaction with thousands of students, I have witnesses the pleasure and empowerment that skilled craftwork offers. There is a deep centredness in trusting one's hands, mind, and imagination to work as a single, well-tuned instrument, a centredness that touches upon the very essence of fulfillment. What better way to inhabit one's innate human capabilities productively and powerfully, like an engine firing smoothly on all pistons.'

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.53.

THE PLEASURE OF CREATIVITY

'...my experience has been that the effort to bring something new and meaningful into the world - whether in the arts, the kitchen, or the marketplace - is exactly what generates the sense of meaning and fulfillment for which so many of us yearn so deeply.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman, p.13. 

THE POWER OF AN ACCENT

'Vast crowds of people. mostly upper-middle class, the women with the sort of voices one supposes breeds Communism.' 

Kenneth Rose, Who's In, Who's Out: The Journals of Kenneth Rose, Volume One 1944-1979 (Edited by DR Thorpe), p.78. 

OUR SOCIETAL SELF-HARM

'Language is only language; we need, rather, to hear the cries of those who don't feel happy in their skins, to dare to find out the source of their misery. We, as a society, need to be brave enough to hear the truth: 'It's you we don't like, the society which nurtured us, or forgot to nurture us. You haven't made a good home for us here. We hate our stupid gender scripts you foisted on us, we don't feel beautiful, we don't feel successful, and we don't feel we matter.' 

And aren't they right? Isn't it time to do away with the male tribe and the female tribe and become people again? Hasn't the time come to unravel our uber-sexualisation? To put the spotlight on what joins us, and not what divides us?' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.270. 

REAL LOVE

'Real love is the very opposite of idealisation. Rather, it has to do with knowledge, a deep, real, sensitive knowledge of the other people in your life and the care you give them. Love is a kind of knowing. 

The real lover is neither Rossetti or Picasso. The real lover is the man who broke down on Women's Hour this morning. He spent three years looking after his dying wife, tending her each day, doing her teeth, washing her hair, putting a new necklace around her neck each morning, something she had done for herself before she got dementia.  

'Why don't you put her in a home and get a life?' his friends would ask him. 

'Because she is my life,' he told them.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.222. 

IN RELINQUISHING JUDGEMENTALISM WE'VE RELINQUISHED IDEALS

'Nowadays, there are few greater character defects than being judgmental. But in relinquishing judgement, we also relinquish ideals. The ideal of fidelity, the ideal of a family life, with a mother and a father; the ideals of honour, self-control and reverence. The old establishment, the clergy, schools, family and community life were by no means perfect and squeaky clean, but they offered a backdrop that was safe in this tricky business of being human. Sometimes, perhaps, it's better, easier, not to have too much choice. There's a word in German, angst, which perfectly describes the mental anxiety we experience when too many options are presented to us. This hyper-individualism is not good for us, this obsessive introspection isn't making us happy. Sometimes our young don't even know they are boys or girls, men or women, and nobody bothers to point out to them that bodies are just bodies, they can't be blamed. It's only societies which make mistakes.'

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.190  

SEXUAL ABUSE BY IDEOLOGY

'When I told a friend that I was going to write this book - a close friend who has known me for twenty years - she said to me, 'Olivia, I have never seen you so angry Where has your anger come from?' I told her that I had been abused, not by another without my permission, neither by Jimmy Saville, nor a film producer, nor a priest. Rather, I have been abused by the dominant ideology of the day: that sex is important and profound and you are obliged to join in.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.160. 

REAL INTIMACY

'The real business of being human, I would like to argue, has little to with sex. Sex is rightly listed alongside the pleasures of eating and drinking. The same pleasure centre of the brain is lit up. But it's not intimate. Intimacy is about a spiritual, not a physical closeness. 

Real intimacy is singularly unerotic. When my mother died, when my husband's parents died, when we listened to each other and held each other - that was intimate. Being with someone who is grieving and being allowed in, being trusted to that extent - that is true intimacy, in a way that showing off our new negligee is not.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.95. 

ARE WE ALL TRANSGENDER?

'To the question, 'is gender binary?' the answer is, biologically, yes. The minute percentage of intersex conditions are errors in the generic code. But psychosocially, the answer is an emphatic no. We all share stereotypically male and female qualities, that's a fact. It might just turn out that we are all transgender, if that means a mismatch between social script and biological body. It's just that some of us take gender more seriously than others, and decide to do something about it.'

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.62. 

THE DAMAGE WE'VE CAUSED

'...we caused transgenderism, we as a society set up the circumstances which made it inevitable. We gave the genders these absurd roles, because our appetite for sex demanded super-male men and super-female women. But human beings don't fit snugly into the binary categories we have set up for them. Our genders have been artificially exaggerated, and the contrary reactions - both transgenderism and the refusal to acknowledge as more than a social construct - are both the consequence of that. Yet the truth of the matter is surely this: we have significantly more in common with a person who shares our background in interests and outlook, than with a person who happens to share the same XX/XY chromosome. Men and women really aren't that different from each other.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.xiii.

THE LIMITS TO CHILDREN'S KNOWLEDGE

'Children know much more than their elders imagine, but as they misinterpret it, they often know less.' 

Martin Boyd, A Difficult Young Man, p.59. 

WORSHIP DEFINED

'Worship is the human response to divine initiative.'
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.197. 

WHERE WILLINGNESS TO FORGIVE IS FOUND

'We do not have to make God willing to forgive. In fact, it is God who is working to make us willing to seek his forgiveness.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.189. 

HIDDEN SERVICE AS THANKSGIVING

'Joyous hidden service to others is an acted prayer of thanksgiving.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline p.163. 

A DIALOGUE-ANTHEM

Christian, Death

Chr. Alas, poor Death, where is thy glory?
Where is thy famous force, thy ancient sting?
Dea.  Alas, poor mortal, void of story,
Go spell and read how I have killed thy King.
Chr. Poor Death! and who was hurt thereby?
Thy curse being laid on Him makes thee accurst.
Dea.  Let losers talk, yet thou shalt die;
These arms shall crush thee.
Chr.                                               Spare not, do thy worst.
I shall be one day better than before;
Thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more.

George Herbert, The Complete English Works, p.165. 

THE POINT OF FASTING

'The central idea in fasting is the voluntary denial of an otherwise normal function for the sake of intense spiritual activity.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.73.

PERMISSION TO FAIL AT PRAYER

'I was liberating to me to understand that prayer involved a learning process. I was set free to question, to experiment, even to fail, for I knew I was learning.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.46. 

OUR DESIRE FOR A GO-BETWEEN

'Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message secondhand. One of Israel's fatal mistakes was their insistence upon having a human king rather than resting in the theocratic rule of God over them. We can detect a note of sadness in the word of the Lord, 'They have rejected me from being king over them!' (1 San.8:7). The history of religion is the story of almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between.  In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change. We do not need to observe Western culture very closely to realise that it is captivated by the religion of the mediator.' 

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline; The Path to Spiritual Growth, p.28. 

THE EFFECT OF BULLYING ON A BULLY

'Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person's life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned that I was not to be trusted.' 

William Maxwell, 'With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge' in Billie Dyer and Other Stories, p.68. 

THE FATHER LOVE OF GOD

'At the heart of the madness of the gospel is an almost unbelievable mystery that speaks to a deep human hunger only intensified by a generation of broken homes: to be seen and known and loved by a father. Maybe navigating the tragedy and heartbreak of this fallen world is realizing this hunger might not be met by the ones we expect or hope will come looking for us, but then meeting a Father who adopts you, who chooses you, who sees you a long way off and comes running and says "I've been waiting for you."' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.201. 

OPPOSITES UNDERSTAND

'...opposites often instinctively understand each other...'
William Maxwell, 'My Father's Friends' in Billy Dyer and Other Stories, p.80. 

THE CHALLENGE OF COMPLIMENTING SOMEONE FOR SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL

'Obviously I have not got through a long life without praising people - their houses, their gardens, their wives, their children, their political opinions, quite often their writing. But though I have liked a lot of people and loved a few, I have never been much good as telling them so, or telling them why. The more my admiration goes out to a man or woman personally, and not to some performance or accomplishment, the harder it is for me to express. The closer I come to fundamental values and beliefs, the closer I come to reticence. It is a more naked act for me to tell someone I am impressed by his principles and his integrity than to say I like his book or his necktie.' 

Wallace Stegner, 'A Letter to Wendell Berry' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.207. 

WHAT EXPERIENCE DO WRITERS NEED?

'We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.84. 

THE LIMITS OF FICTION

'It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever got away with much.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.76. 

SYMBOLISM

'Now the word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does. They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader - sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated. They seem to think that it is a way of saying something that you aren't actually saying, and so if they can be got to read a reputedly symbolic work at all, they approach it as if it were a problem in algebra. Find x. And when they do find or think they find this abstraction, x, then they go off with an elaborate sense of satisfaction and the notion that they have "understood" the story. Many students confuse the process of understanding a thing with understanding it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.71. 

WHAT MAKES WRITING ENGAGING?

'A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make on object real; and she believes that this is connected with us having five senses. If you're deprived of any of them, you're in a bad way, but if you're deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren't present.' 

Flannery O Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery & Manners, p.69. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF INHABITING A STORY

'To be without a story is to live without any type of script that might help us know who we are and what we're about. We flail and meander. We frantically try on roles and identities to see if they fit. To be character-ized by a story is to have a name, a backstory, a project - all of which serve as rails to run on, something stable and given that we count on. We can be known because there's someone to know.' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.163. 

HOMESICK FOR THE FUTURE

'Nowhere was my sense of belonging as complete or unambiguous as it was in my childhood home, but if I saw that sense of belonging as something exclusive to the ironstone house, then I would never really leave, never grow up, never look for my place in the world. Somehow I had to turn my nostalgia inside-out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging, that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened.' 

William Fiennes, The Snow Geese, p.203. 

PSALM 23

'...only a few months before I had copied the last verse of the psalm into a notebook: 'But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.' It had occurred to me how often the the authors of scripture depict God as a house or shelter in which one might dwell, as if faith were itself a home, affording all the protection, comfort, stediness and sense of belonging that home implies - as if the need for God were homesickness in paraphrase.' 

William Fiennes, The Snow Geese, p.104. 

A GAMBLING 'CURATE'

'...he looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.'
PG Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves in Life with Jeeves, p.31. 

THE FUTILITY OF IDOLATRY

'...the problem with idolatry is that it is an exercise in futility, a penchant that ends in profound dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Idolatry, we might say doesn't "work" - which is why it creates restless hearts. In idolatry we are enjoying what we're supposed to be using. We are treating as ultimate what is only penultimate; we are heaping infinite, immortal expectations on created things that will pass away; we are settling on some aspect of the creation rather than being referred through to its Creator.' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.82. 

THE IDENTITY QUESTION

'The crucial question is not, Who I am? but, Whose am I?'

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.310. 

HOW TO BE REMEMBERED

'The uncommitted person is the unremembered person. A person who does not commit to some loyalty outside the self leaves no deep mark on the world.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.299. 

THE SECRET OF LIFE

'The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.' 

Henry Moore in David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.295. 

PROTRACTED LONELINESS

'Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact. You become hyper vigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need the most.' 

Johann Hari in David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.269. 

A BEAUTIFUL PRAYER

'Guard Thou my soul,
strengthen my body,
elevate my senses,
direct my course,
order my habits,
shape my character,
bless my actions,
fulfill my prayers,
inspire holy thoughts,
pardon the past,
correct the present,
prevent the future.'
Lancelot Andrewes, Private Devotions - Seventh Day: Intercessions (Edited by Alexander Whyte), p.25. 

GOOD COMMUNICATION

'She heard a quiet sniffle of laughter and a moment's silence, the way Lank held space for you in case you wanted to continue, without crowding the words that might need a minute to form.' 

Anne Lamott, Imperfect Birds, p.156. 

PERFECTIONISM MEETS HUMANKIND

'There's no room for perfectionism when you're dealing with something as broken as real human beings, only bemused affection.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.183. 

THE PICKLE THAT IS MARRIAGE

'The only way to thrive in marriage is to become a better person - more patient, wise, compassionate, persevering, communicative, and humble. When we make a commitment, we put ourselves into a pickle we have to be selfless to get out of.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.174. 

INTIMACY

'Intimacy happens when somebody shares something emotionally meaningful, and the other person receives it and shares back.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.151. 

MARRIAGE AS SURVEILLANCE

'...to be married is to volunteer for the most thorough surveillance program known to humankind. The person who is married is watched, more or less all the time. Worse, the awareness that you are being watched compels you to watch yourself. This new self-consciousness introduces you to yourself, to all the stupid things you do, from leaving the cupboards open, to the way you are silent and grumpy in the morning, to the way you avoid any difficult conversation or play passive aggressive when you are feeling hurt, as if life were some elaborate game of victimhood in which if you make your spouse feel guilty for hurting you you will get a slice of cherry cake at the end.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.145.