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.

HOW TO UNDERMINE A FRIENDSHIP

'The way to make friends quarrel is to pit them in disputation under the public eye...'
Thomas Jefferson in Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson, p.173.

THE PRECIOUS GIFT OF LOVING DISAGREEMENT

'The occasion to have a safe and thoughtful discussion with someone who genuinely loves you and disagrees with you passionately is a rare and precious gift.'

Gregg A Ten Elshof, I told me so: self-deception and the Christian life, p.119.

WHY WE DO DISAGREEMENT BADLY

'We tend not to have a category for disagreement between equally sincere, intelligent, and well-informed people where there is a genuine and discoverable truth of the matter. And without such a category, we're faced with a choice between (i) giving up on the idea that we know the truth on the issue in question or (ii) thinking of our opponent as insincere, stupid, or ill-informed. If our cause is one we cherish, the second option will be the most attractive. And once we've got our opponent characterized as insincere, stupid, or ill-informed, then mistreatment, mockery, and exclusion from serious discussion - all for the sake of the cause, of course - will come more easily.'

Gregg A Ten Elshof, I told me so: self-deception and the Christian life, p.92.

DISMISSING EVANGELICALS

'"One of the Evangelical clergy, a disciple of Venn," says the critic from his bird's eye station. "Not a remarkable specimen; the anatomy and habits of his species have been determined long ago."

Yet, surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him - which gives us a fine ear for the heart-impulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstances and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms the human thought and work, the life and death struggles of separate human beings.' 

George Eliot, 'Janet's Repentance' in Scenes of Clerical Life, p.322. 

GRACE IN DISAGREEMENT

'While we are coldly discussing a man's career, sneering at his mistakes, blaming his rashness, and labelling his opinions - "Evangelical and narrow", ot "Latitudinarian and Pantheistic" or "Anglican and supercilious" - that man, in his solitude, is perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one, because strength and patience are failing him to speak the difficult word, and do the difficult deed.' 

George Eliot, 'Janet's Repentance' in Scenes of Clerical Life, p.312. 

THE DANGER OF IDENTITY POLITICS

'The fact is, it's difficult to say where legitimate affirmation of identity ends and encroachment on the rights of others begins. Did I not say that the word identity was a "false friend"? It starts by reflecting a perfectly permissible aspiration, then before we know where we are it has become an instrument of war. The transition from one meaning to the other is imperceptible, almost natural and sometimes we all juts go along with it. We are denouncing injustice, we are defending the rights of a suffering people - then the next day we find ourselves accomplices in a massacre.' 

Amin Maalouf, On Identity, p.28. 

A LACK OF ROOTS

'Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn't uproot others.' 

Simone Weil,. The Need for Roots, p.45. 

FRIENDSHIP

'Quarrels between friends occur more than anything else when there is a difference between what they think the basis of the friendship is and what it actually is...' 

Aristotle in Mark Vernon, The Meaning of Friendship, p.101. 

CONFLICT

'I am aware that certain writers have made the argument, or at least the assertion, that conflict arises out of religion and more especially out of religious difference. They would do well to consult Herodotus, or to read up on the career of Napoleon. Extrapolations from contemporary events proceed from far too narrow a base to support a global statement of this kind. And this thesis about the origins of conflict is novel in the long history of the debate over human origins, which has typically argued that conflict is natural to us, as it is to animals, and is, if not good in any ordinary sense, at least necessary to our biological enhancement. However, if attributing conflict to religion, thereby removing hostility and violence from a Darwinist or even a Freudian frame of interpretation, is a departure from tradition, it is at least familiar as a strategy that preserves a favored conclusion by recruiting whatever rationalization that might seem to support it. Religion has always been the foil for this tradition, sometimes deplored as the sponsor of dysgenic compassion, sometimes as formenter of oppression and violence.'

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, p.xi.

CONFESSING CHRIST

'If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the Devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.'

Martin Luther in Randy Newman, Questioning Evangelismn: Engaging People's Hearts the Way Jesus Did, p.154.