MY 2025 READING/ LISTENING

Those in bold are, I think, my top ten:  

January

1. Nigel Townson, The Penguin History of Spain: 1898 to the Present 
2. Curtis Garner, Isaac 
3. Sam Leith, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading 
4. Craig Brown, A Voyage around the Queen [Audiobook]
5. Matthew Porter, The Act of Giving: Becoming a more generous person 
6. JA Medders and Douglas Logan Jr., The Soul-Winning Church: Six Keys to Fostering a Genuine Evangelistic Culture 

February 

1. Samantha Harvey, Orbital 
2. Pete Grieg, God on Mute: Engaging the silence of unanswered prayer 
3. John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies 
4. Craig Willse, Providence: A Novel [Audiobook] 
5. Erik Varden, Chastity: Reconciliation of the senses 
6. Gavin Ortlund, The Art of Disagreeing;How to Keep Calm and Stay Friends in Hard Conversations

March 

1. Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons [Audiobook]
2. Danielle Treweek, Single Ever After: A Biblical Vision for the Significance of Singleness 
3. Iain MacGregor, Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the most dangerous place on earth
4. Julian Barnes, Changing My Mind 
5. Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life: To Live is Christ 
6. Nancy Guthrie, What Grieving People Wish You Knew about What Really Helps (and What Really Hurts) 

April 

1. Hans-Hermann Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story: Biography of a Monument 
2. Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin 
3. Édouard Louis, Change 
4. Wesley Hill, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus
5. Chukwuebuka Ibeh, Blessings 
6. Peter Riddell, 15 Minutes of Power: The uncertain life of British ministers
7. Ste Casey, I prayed and nothing changed: What God is up to in the silence 
8. William Maxwell, The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work

May 

1. Jeramie Rinne, Church Elders: How to shepherd God's people like Jesus
2. Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall [Audiobook] 
3. Dana Gioia, Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a young writer's life 
4. Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection
5. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf 
6. Stewart O'Nan, City of Secrets
7. Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound 
8. Laird Hunt, Zorrie 
9. Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
10. Alec Wilkinson, My Mentor: A Young Writer's Friendship with William Maxwell 
11. Larry McMurty, Streets of Laredo 
12. Jonathan Eig, King:The Life of Martin Luther King 
13. Paul Harding, This Other Eden 
14. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Deepening Stream 
15. Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance 
16. Sally Rooney, Intermezzo 

June

1. Min Jin Lee, Pachinko [Audiobook]
2. Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
3. Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country: Searching for trust and community in a time of moral outrage

July 

1. Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again [Audiobook] 
2. Mavis Gallant, The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories 
3. Carys Davies, Clear

August 

1. Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl 
2. Gilbert Meilaender, They Will Be Done: The Ten Commandments and the Christian Life 
3. Frances Spalding, The Real and the Romantic: English art between two world wars
4. Edward T Welch, Caring for One Another: 8 Ways to Cultivate Meaninful Relationships 
5. Helen Garner, The Children's Bach
6. Claire Dederer, Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People? 
7. Allen Bratton, Henry Henry [Audiobook] 

September

1. Victoria Mackenzie, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain 
2. Sang Young Park, Love in the Big City
3. Nora Ephron, Heartburn
4. Niall Williams, John
5. Percival Everett, Wounded
6. Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional
7. Sarah Vine, How not to be a political wife: A memoir [Audiobook]
8. Jane Gardam, Old Filth

October 

1. Joe Brainard, I Remember 
2. Erin F Moniz, Knowing and Being Known: Hope for All Our Intimate Relationships  
3. Kim Hye-jin, Concerning My Daughter
4. Vincent D Cha & Ramon Pacheco Pardo, Korea: A New History of South & North
5. Mavis Gallant, Green Water, Green Sky
6. John Lanchester, Fragrant Harbour
7. Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat 
8. Jane Gardam, Last Friends

November 

1. Mark Yarhouse and Julia Sadusky, Emerging Sexual Identities: Navigating the landscape and today's youth 
2. Cody Keenan, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America
3. Han Kang, Greek Lessons 
4. Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story
5. Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life
6. Seth Lewis, The Language of Rivers and Stars: How Nature Speaks of the Glories of God
7. Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds; Six Stories of the Port William Membership [Audiobook] 
8. Meg-John Barker & Jules Scheele, Queer: A Graphic History

December

1. Wendell Berry, A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership [Audiobook] 
2. Jack Brown, No.10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street
3. Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest 
4. Daniel R Patterson, Reforming a Theology of Gender: Constructive Reflections on Judith Butler & Queer Theory 
5. Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time 
6. Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The wisdom of the desert 
7. Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic

OUR NEED OF STORIES

'We all need narratives to make sense of the world.'
Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey, p.290.

GOOD TEACHING

'...the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way - because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death - good teaching is like good parenting.'

Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic, p.215.

CHURCH RENEWAL

'The church is always renewed from the edges rather than the centre.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.109.

CHANGING CHURCHES

'If you leave a church community too quickly, you find it becomes a habit; more salt to drink. Sooner or later you will have to confront the challenge of being pledged to uncomfortable reality - and how to cope with the inner restlessness which constantly suggest what look like simpler solutions, avoiding the difficult route of changing myself.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.97.

OUR UNIQUE PATH TO HOLINESS

'I cannot become holy by copying another's path. Like the novice in the desert, I must watch the elders and learn the shape and rhythm of being Christian from those who have walked further and worked harder; but then I have to take my own steps, and create a life that has never beeen lived before. At the Day of Juidgment, as we are often reminded, the question will not be why we failed to be someone else; I shall not be asked why I wasn't Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa, but why I wasn't Rowan Williams. The journey is always one that leads into more not less uniqueness; all to do once agan with the call to be persons, not individuals.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.95.

THE BODY SAVES THE SOUL

'Only the body saves the soul. It sounds rather shocking put like that, but the point is that the soul (whatever exactly that is) left to itself, the inner life or whatever you want to call it, is not capable of transforming itself. It needs the gifts that only the external life can deliver: the actual events of God's action in history, heard by physical ears, the actual material fact of the meeting of believers where bread and wine are shared, the actual wondeful, disagreeable, impossible, unpredictable human beings we encounter daily, in and out of the church. Only in this setting do we become holy - in a way entirely unique to each one of us.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.94.

INTIMACY WITH YOURSELF

'To be a real agent for God to connect with the neighbour in the way we have been thinking about, each of us needs to know the specific truth about himself or herself; that is to say, it's no good just saying to yourself, 'I'm a sinner,' in general terms. The specific facts of your experience may or may not be helpful to another - you should not assume that you always need to share the detail, but you need to know it yourself. To be the means of reconciliation for another within the body of Christ, you must be consciously yourself, knowing a bit about what has made you who you are, what your particular problems and brick walls are, what your gifts are.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.39.

CHURCH AS A COMMUNITY OF FAILURE

'The church is a community that exists because something has happened which makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God's truth and God's mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perfom and told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreadful consequences of our failure, so that we need not labour anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God. The church's aim is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experiencable. One of the chief sources of the anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect my picture of myself as right and good. So one of the most obvious characteristics of the church ought to be a willingness to abandon anything like competitive virtue (or competitive suffering or competitive victimage, competitive tolerance or competitive intolerance or whatever). The church points to the all-sufficiency of Christ when it is full of people whose concern is not to seperate others from the hope of reconciliation and life by their fears and obssessions. A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected to God by seeking to connect others with God; one in which we 'win God' by converting one another by our truthful awareness of fraility. And a church that is living in such a way is the only church that will have anything different to say to the world: how deeply depressing if all the church offered were new and better ways to succeed at the expense of others, reinstating the scapegoat mechanisms that the cross of Christ should have exploded once and for all.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, p.33. 

THE BASIS OF GOOD CHRISTIAN COUNSELLING

'The fundamental need as far as the counsellor is concerned is first of all to put themselves on the level of the one who has sinned, to heal by solidarity not condemnation.'

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The wisdom of the desert, p.28.

A COMPLEMENTARY MARRIAGE

'The big surprise that marriage to Vincent had sprung on her was contentment. She had moments of desolation and moments of great joy, but underneath was some steady current of feeling. Misty's propensity toward pessimism and Vincent's towards optimism really did complement. Vincent was not less cheerful, and Misty was only slightly less judgmental, but they seemed to have formed a third person who smoothed out their edges and made life together possible and profirtable.'

Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time, p.205.

KNOW YOUR FAMILY TREE

'Andy could not have understood his father until he had understood his grandfather.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.110.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO COME HOME

'What was his homecoming like for Andy? It was like being naked and cold and then getting into his clothes.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.106.

TRUE MEMBERSHIP

'They followed the only rule of membership: When any of them needed help, the others came to help. By extension of their one rule, there was no "settling up." All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody's need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.106.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE

'...he had misplaced himself...'
Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.103.

THE SUFFERINGS THAT COME FROM FRIENDSHIP

'Jim Stedman then felt in his heart one of the hardest of human sufferings: the wish to help his friend more than he knew he could.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, p.25.

THE MIRACLE OF THE ORDINARY

'When God does something awe-inspiring one time, we call it a miracle. When he does it a billion times, we call it ordinary. Look a little closer, and you'll see that "ordinary" is just another word for the miracles God decided to repeat. And he repeats them on purpose - the natural world is overflowing all around us with a constant stream of God's language, with never-ending messages from our Creator.'

Seth Lewis, The Language of Rivers and Stars, p.159.

BEAUTY IS GOD'S HANDWRITING

'Never lose an oppurtnity of seeing anything beautiful. Beauty is God's hand-writing - a wayside sacrament: welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank Him for it, the fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in, simply and eaernestly, with all your eyes; it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.'

Charles Kingsley in Seth Lewis, The Language of Rivers and Stars, p.155.

WHY NATURE CONNECTS US TO GOD

'The reason why we so often feel closer to God in nature is because nature is specifically designed to bring us close to God.'

Seth Lewis, The Language of Rivers and Stars, p.151.

OUR FANTASIES ARE DERIVATIVE

'Our fantasy stories are remixed realities - they take the things we are familiar with and enhance or rearrange them to get our attention. The real world is the original mix, and it's far more creative than our stories.

Which is more fantastical: a horse with a horn or horse with a six-foot-long neck, and a bunch of giant freckles? Does it seem more likely for the real world to contain a large lizard that breathes fire or a small bug whose backside is a light bulb? Does it seem more plausible that a pumpkin could turn into a carriage or that a caterpillar could melt itself into goo and rebuld itself into a flying work of art?

The truth is stanger than fiction, and there's a good reason why: the creativity of our fantasies is only a subset of the creativity of God. Even our most imaginative stories are built on God's much more imaginitive realities. Who would have dreamed a mouse that flies in the dark using sonar and sleeps upside down? Who would have thought of filling the nortern sky with shining rivers of green and blue? God. That's who.'

Seth Lewis, The Language of Rivers and Stars, p.48.

GOD SPEAKS TWO LANGUAGES

'Communication is relational. God did not have to speak to us. He communicates because he wants to reveal himself. He gave his word and his world to invite us to know relate to him. He gave this invitation in two languages, and the completeness and clarity of the language of Scripture has not diminished our need to hear God's word in creation as well. Scripture itself is filled with references to God's world - from mountains and stars to sparrows and wild flowers and the morning mist that evaporates in the rising sunshine. God never intended for us to choose one language and ignore the other.'

Seth Lewis, The Language of Rivers and Stars: How Nature Speaks of the Glories of God, p.32.

WHERE LONELINESS LEADS

'…loneliness is not just a signpost to the anticipated consummation of Christ’s work; it is also a signpost to the very brokenness that haunts our lives. In a way, loneliness is a doorway, and once we walk through it and cross its threshold, we discover that behind the initial panel of our loneliness are the actual issues we’re suffering from.'

Erin F Moniz, Knowing and Being Known, p.147.

THE ACHE OF LONELINESS

'...the ache of loneliness is an ever-present reminder that the wholeness and connection we crave, the very fellowship we are created for, will not be fulfilled until all things are made new in the second coming of Christ...We can comfort each other in the solidarity of this condition. We can welcome the ache knowing it will not last forever and that Christ's redeeming work is moving even now, inviting us in.'

Erin F Moniz, Knowing and Being Known: Hope for All Our Intimate Relationships, p.144.

A REVELATION OF DIVINE LOVE

'From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord's meaning. It was more than fifthteen years after that I was answered in my Spirit's understanding. 'You would know our Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold onto this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else - ever!'

So it was that I learned that love was our Lord's meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us; and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love all his works have been done, and in this love our life is everlasting. Our beginning was when we were made, but love in which he made us never had beginning. In it we have our beginning.

All this we shall see in God for ever. May Jesus grant this.

Amen.'

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, p.111.

THE POWER OF LOVE

'When we talk about the problem of the art of monstrous men, we are really talking about a larger problem - the problem of human love. The question "what do we do with the art?" is a kind of laboratory or a kind of practice for the real deal, the real question: what is it to love someone awful? The problem is that you still love her. How often this describes our relationships with our families, our spouses, sometimes even our children. It's the problem and it's the solution, this durable nature of love, the way it withstands all the shit we throw at it, the bad behaviour, the disappointments, the antrums, the betrayals.

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Families are hard because they are the monsters (and angels, and everything in between) that are foisted upon us. They're unchosen monsters. How random it all seems, when you really consider it. And yet somehow we mostly end up loving our families anyway.

When I was young, I believed in the perfectibility of humans. I believed that the people I loved should be perfect and I should be perfect too. That's not quite how love works.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.256.

ART IS A CONVERSATION

'...consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist, which might disrupt the consuming of the art; and the biography of the audience member, which might shape the viewing of the art. I repeat: this occurs in every case.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.251.

BEAUTY UNITES

'...beauty is not the product of communities. It creates communities. Communities of desire, if you wish.'

Dave Hickey in Claire Dederer in Monsters, p.244.

BEAUTY HAPPENS

'We don't make decisions about beauty. Beauty happens to us.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.244.

ORGINAL SIN EXPRESSED TODAY

'Even in the midst of my righteous indignation when I bitch about Woody and Soon-Yi, I know that on some level, I'm not an entirely upstanding citizen myself. In everyday deed and thought, I'm a decent-enough human. But I'm something else as well, something more objectionable. The Victorians understood this feeling; its why they gave us the stark bifurcations of Dorian Gray, of Jekyll and Hyde. I suuppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us - in me - chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in my self, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People?, p.38.

GOD LEADS THE WAY IN SELF-SACRIFICE

'...the way of renunciation is not alien to God. In Jesus, God has been there ahead of us...'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.123.

FROM CHURCH CHOIRS TO WORLD WARS

'The historian Herbert Butterfield is supposed to have said that if we take the animosity present in an average church choir and give that animosity a history by extending it over time, we will have an adequate explanation of all the wars ever fought in human history.'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.64.

SIN IS INGRATITUDE

'Radically and basically all sin is simply ingratitude.'
Karl Barth in Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done, p.56

WHAT SEXUAL ETHICS ARE ALL ABOUT

'...a "crisis" in sexual ethics is never simply that; it is a crisis in our understanding of what it means to be a person. Are we beings characterized most of all by will and choice, beings who confer meaning and value on our acts by our choices? Or are we beings who discover meaning and value in the embodied life God has created? Because the latter is the truth, the church can offer to the world something more hopeful than the idea that what is good depends largely on our own choosing.'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done: The Ten Commandments and the Christian Life, p.21.

WHAT CHILDREN SENSE

'Unconsciously, everyone under the age of ten knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocriosy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty.'

Mavis Gallant, 'The Doctor' in The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories, p.173.

HUMILITY

'Humility is the proper ordering of worth in life.'
Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.221.

INTIMACY WITH YOURSELF THROUGH INTIMACY WITH OTHERS

'Personhood develops in relationships. In turning to face each other, we see ourselves through new eyes, learning about our assumptions, fears, dreams and desires. As the other person draws out what is unique to me, I learn to become myself. Others experience me and tell me what they experience, freeing me to explore the external world in a new light. The encounter will be as rich as the honesty and generosity of hearts that accompany it. Other people confirm our existence and validate our worth by accepting and enjoying our presence.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.178.

WHAT'S MORE IMPORTANT

'As important as beautifully formulated theological propositions are to the Christian faith, they are no substitute for learning to live in the presence of God, who is present in all times and places.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.129.

HOW TO SPOT AN IDOL

'An object is free of idolatry when we associate with it only those attributes it actually has, no more and no less.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.69.

THE TRINITY & INTIMACY

'God is simultaneously three and one. We reflect God's image in being in communion with each other while simultaneously being unique. The invitation to intimacy is to a communion of unique persons; to each other and to all. Both the communion and the unique persons are important.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.64.

TRUE FREEDOM

'...Christian freedom...is the essential freedom of human beings to develop themselves as human creatures.'

Hans Rookmaaker in Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country: Searching for trust and community in a time of moral outrage, p.53.

PATHS TO GOD

'...any authentic longing, any longing that, even implicitly, points towards eternity, is a possible path towards God.'

Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.145.

TO BE HUMAN

'To be created in God's image - to be human - is to carry in the depth of one's being a longing to transcend the boundaries of human nature so as to have a share in divine life.'

Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.139.

WHAT WE'RE MADE OF

'...I'm made of longing...'
Rainer Maria Rilke in Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.134.

THE FRAGILITY OF HAPPINES

'Happiness involves finding oneself the recipient of a spectacle, a moment, an atmosphere, and taking, accepting, and grasping the blessing of the moment. For that there be no recipe, no preparation; one has to be there when the moment comes. Otherwise, it's something else: satisfaction in having achieved something, joy in doing what you know how to do. Happiness is fragile precisely because it is not repeatable; opportunities for it are rare and random, like old threads in the world's fabric. They ought to be seized.'

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, p.121.

BEWARE!

'...the chief intoxicant of spiritual life: self-righteous ingratitude.'
Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.42.

HUMANITY

'I am dust with a nostalgia for glory.'
Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance, p.32.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS' RESURRECTION

'The sun rose and set every day. The moon, too. The tides went out and came in. The seasons turned in order. Some of the trees lost their leaves in the autumn and grew them back in the spring. People ate breakfast and supper when they had food and smoked and drank their tea. They had babies and raised them. They worked and slept. They sang and laughed and yelled and wept and fought and coupled. But from the first time she'd heard it, Esther Honey understood that if the man Jesus had died and been buried then really and truly rose, it was the only time such a thing had ever happened and that meant everything else in the world took its real meaning from that young man lying dead in his grave and awakening back to life and rolling the stone away from his tomb and saying goodbye to his friends and helpless not in spirit but actually in that body that had died and come back to life.'

Paul Harding, This Other Eden, p.193.

TRUE FREEDOM

'Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.129.

HUMAN WHOLENESS

'Men are whole not only insofar as they make common cause with each other, but also insofar as they make common cause with their native earth, which is to say with creation as a whole, which is to say with the creator.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.104.

THE POWER OF FANTASY

'My childhood was surrounded by a communal daydreaming, the richest sort of imaginative talk, that began this way - in work, in the misery of work, to make the work bearable and even pleasant. Such talk ranged all the way from a kind of sensuous realism to utter fantasy, but because the bounds of possibility were almost always ignored I would say that the impetus was always that of fantasy. I have heard crowds of men, weary and hungry and hot near the end of a day's work, construct long elaborate conversations on the subject of what would be good to eat and drink, dwelling at length and with subtlety on the taste and the hotness or the coldness of various dishes and beverages, and on combinations of dishes and beverages, the menu lengthening far beyond the capacity of any living stomach. I knew one man who every year got himself through the ordeal of the tobacco harvest by elaborating from one day to the next the fantasy of an epical picnic and celebration which was always to occur except, richly, marvelously, in the minds of his listeners.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.44.

PERSPECTIVE

'One afternoon [in 1939] I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata...Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: "Hitler is making a speech." I shouted back: "I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead." Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowers flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.'

Leonard Woolf in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p.727.

THE POWER OF FICTION

'...fiction is our most intimate and acute means of communication, at a profound level, about our deepest apprehensions and intuitions on the meaning of life and death. And that is what binds us together, young and old.'

John Cheever in Dana Gioia, Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a young writer's life p.168.

READING NOVELS

'Life being so terribly short, and without guarantees against disaster, it is something that by picking up a book what we know to be true we can place in the widest possible context, and take the world in through eyes and hearts that are not our own. We have this always accessible form of reincarnation.'

William Maxwell, The Writer at Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work, p.106.

GOD'S POWER MADE PERFECT IN WEAKNESS

'Where on earth does the glory of God dwell in power? It is in people that are needy and at their end - people that have given up on believing that they can be the hero of their story or that their dreams of a designer life will deliver. So God abides - his power to strengthen sits over, rests upon, and meets with people in the lowly place of acknowledged weakness and need.'

Ste Casey, I prayed and nothing changed: What God is up to in the silence, p.114.

JESUS' RESURRECTION BODY

'Once incarnate, always incarnate, we might say...'
Wesley Hill, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus, p.85.

GRIEF

'...grief, as I said, is a state as well as a process. And as with love, time simultaneously both stops and moves. You want it to stop - to be a state, so that you can hold on as much as possible to the image and memory of the lost loved one; but you also want it to be a process, one which will convey you out of this strange new land of pain before your spirit breaks.'

Julian Barnes, Changing My Mind, p.56.

THE REACH OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

'Self-righteousness can feed upon doctrines, as well as upon works....'
John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.258.

PASSING ON THE COMFORT

'Some of our afflictions perhaps befall us for the sake of our people, that we may be reminded and enabled to speak their feelings, by what we feel ourselves. In this way the tongue of the learned is acquired and skill to speak a word in season to the weary.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.237.

ASSUARANCE

'Assurance is not the eradication of indwelling sin, but the honest and humbled awareness of it.'

Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.222.

HONESTY ABOUT PRAYER

'I sometimes think that the prayers of believers afford a stronger proof of a depraved nature, than even the profaneness of those who know not the Lord. How strange is it, that when I have the fullest convictions that prayer is not only my duty—not only necessary as the appointed means of receiving those supplies, without which I can do nothing, but likewise the greatest honour and privilege to which I can be admitted in the present life—I should still find myself so unwilling to engage in it.

However, I think it is not prayer itself that I am weary of, but such prayers as mine. How can it be accounted prayer, when the heart is so little affected,—when it is polluted with such a mixture of vile and vain imaginations—when I hardly know what I say myself—but I feel my mind collected one minute, the next, my thoughts are gone to the ends of the earth.

If what I express with my lips were written down, and the thoughts which at the same time are passing through my heart were likewise written between the lines, the whole taken together would be such an absurd and incoherent jumble—such a medley of inconsistency, that it might pass for the ravings of a lunatic. When he points out to me the wildness of this jargon, and asks, is this a prayer fit to be presented to the holy heart-searching God? I am at a loss what to answer, till it is given me to recollect that I am not under the law, but under grace—that my hope is to be placed, not in my own prayers, but in the righteousness and intercession of Jesus. The poorer and viler I am in myself, so much the more is the power and riches of His grace magnified in my behalf.

Therefore I must, and, the Lord being my helper, I will pray on, and admire his condescension and love, that He can and does take notice of such a creature—for the event shows, that those prayers which are even displeasing to myself, partial as I am in my own case, are acceptable to him, how else should they be answered? And that I am still permitted to come to a throne of grace—still supported in my walk and in my work, and that mine enemies have not yet prevailed against me, and triumphed over me, affords a full proof that the Lord has heard and has accepted my poor prayers–yea, it is possible, that those very prayers of ours of which we are most ashamed, are the most pleasing to the Lord, and for that reason, because we are ashamed of them. When we are favoured with what we call enlargement, we come away tolerably satisfied with ourselves, and think we have done well.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.205.

I SHALL NOT WANT

'All shall work together for good: everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.194.

JESUS' PASTORAL CARE

'...with the eye, and the ear, and the heart of a friend, he attends to their sorrows; he counts their sighs, puts their tears in his bottle; and when our spirits are overwhelmed within us, he knows our path, and adjusts the time, the measures of our trials, and every thing that is necessary for our present support and reasonable deliverance, with the same unerring wisdom and accuracy as he weighted the mountains in scales and hills in a balance, and meted out the heavens with a span.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p,.202.

THE PURPOSE OF SEXUALITY

'The fire of erotic impulse, intrinsic to human nature, can brighten and warm our lives as a source of gladness and fruitfulness. It can also erupt in conflagrations of deadly passion. In a Christian optic, eros is an impulse towards the divine, but it not itself divine. It has its part to play in ordering human existence towards its true goal, the knowledge and love of God. It must not be mistaken for the goal.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.160.

THE INTIMACY OF BEING TRULY SEEN

'To be seen in truth is an intimate experience. Sight can in fact be more intimate than touch. As any pastor knows, people often go out in search of sexual adventure because they do not feel seen, suffer from this fact and crave a substitute. The risk is that pleasure serves, then, to exacerbate sadness and make loneliness worse. Intimacy does not have to be sexual. Sex can stand in intimacy's way.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.158.

THE ESCHATALOGICAL LIMITS TO BINARIES

'There is an eschatological thrust in the desire to overcome binary oppositions. Christ came to make the two one (cf. Ephesians 2.14, Galatians 3.28). Trouble ensues when human beings try to accomplish overcoming unaided. Christianity entertains hope of transcending human dichotomies not through pendular alterations, but through a transfiguration in love that realizes our thirst for infinity through graced communion with Infinite Being.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.124.

BEING A CHRISTIAN

'The Christian condition is the art of striving to answer a call to perfection while plumbing the depth of our imperfection without despairing and without giving up on the ideal.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.120.

DON'T LOSE THE SUPERNATURAL THRUST OF CHRISTIANITY

'Once the supernatural thrust has gone from Christianity, what remains? Well-meaning sentiment and a set of commandments found to be crushing, the finality of change they were meant to serve having been summarily dismissed.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.114.

FREEDOM FOR, NOT FREEDOM FROM

'Ordinarily we think of freedom as scope to do what we feel like. We think in terms of freedom from, not of freedom unto. In Christian terms, freedom is about enabling commitment. The Biblical view of human nature, evidenced in Christ, regards the human being as essentially relational, oblative and covenantal. On this account, unhindered pursuit of momentary inclinations is not freedom. It it is enslavement to whim, which, empirically speaking, rarely produces last happiness. Sensational thrills can come of it, true, but they are not much of a foundation on which to construct a life.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.113.

WHY BEAUTY MATTER TO US

'The human will to embody beauty is, I suspect, underrated. But it lives in us as a consequence and expression of our iconic nature. He in whose image we are made is Beauty. Beauty is naturally the end towards which we strive.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.59.

OUR DIVINE CRAVINGS

'To be human is to exist with the sense of an absence to be filled. Only the light of our human's substance's longing for union with the divine do our lesser yearnings make sense.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.32.

CHASTITY DEFINED

'...chastity is not a denial of sex. It is an orientation of sexuality, of the whole vital instinct, towards a desired finality. It is a function of the wholeness sought and healing found.'

Erik Varden, Chastity: Reconciliation of the senses, p.17.

THE EXHAUSTION OF EMPATHY

'Always George's problem, seeing both sides of everything. Wore him out.'
John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies, p.341. 

EDEN RESTORED

'When a human being, by the power of God’s grace, expresses a desire that is rooted not in his own selfishness (‘My will’) but rather in God’s plan for creation (‘Thy will’), such a posture reverses the bias of the Fall in that individual’s own life and re-establishes a little piece of Eden, through him or her, on earth.’

Pete Grieg, God on Mute, p.162.

THE INCARNATION

'...the omnipotent God becoming an incontinent baby...'
Pete Greig, God on Mute: Engaging the silence of unanswered prayer, p.158.

THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY

'Idolatry is the folly of expecting a gift to be a giver. The good things of this life are not meant to generate joy in and of themselves. Rather, they are to be gratefully received as they bring our eyes up to our greatest treasure, the one who provides all things and seeks our deepest joy, the Triune God. Idolatry always disappoints, God never does.'

Dane Ortlund, In the Lord I Take Refuge: 150 Daily Devotions through the Psalms, p.373.

WHAT HISTORY TEACHES US

'First, whom the gods would destroy they must first make mad with power. Second, the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small. Third, the bee fertilizes the flower it robs. Fourth, when it is dark enough you can see the stars.'

Charles A Beard in Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore', p.86.

EVIL DESTROYS ITSELF

'...evil carries the seed of its own destruction. In the long run right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.86.

CAESAR VS. CHRIST

'Caesar occupied a palace Christ a cross, but the same Christ so split history into A.D. and B.C. that even the reign of Caesar was subsequently dated by his name.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.81.

THE PRESENCE OF EVIL

'Is anything more obvious that the presence of evil in the universe? Its nagging, prehensile tentacles project into every level of human existence. We may debate the origin of evil, but only a victim of superficial optimism would debate its reality. Evil is stark, grim, and colossally real.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.79.

WORLD TRANSFORMING CHRISTIANITY

'We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune and life itself on behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'Transformed Nonconformists' in The Gift of Love, p.16.

WHERE OUR ULTIMATE LOYALTY LIES

'Living in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity. As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'Transformed Nonconformist' in The Gift of Love, p.12.