THOUGHT NEEDS EMOTION

'Thinking without emotion is impoverished thinking.'
Matthew Mullins, Enjoying the Bible, p.71.

THE POWER OF A GOOD WALK

'All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.'
Friedrich Nietzsche in Claudia Hammond, The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age, p.97. 

DIFFERENT TYPES OF DOUBT

'...the Bible's view of doubt is wonderfully nuanced. In many circles, skepticism and doubt are considered an absolute, unmitigated good. On the other hand, in a lot of conservative and traditional religious circles, any and all questioning or doubting is thought to be bad. If you are in a church youth group and you have questions about the Bible, the youth leader may mark at you, "You shouldn't doubt! You have to have faith." 

What you have in the Bible is neither view. There is a kind of doubt that is the sign of a closed mind, and there is a kind of doubt that is the sign of an open mind. Some doubt seeks answers, and some doubt is a defense against the possibility of answers. There are people like Mary who are open to the truth and are willing to relinquish sovereignty over their lives if they can be shown that the truth is other than they thought. And there are those like Zechariah who use doubts as a way of staying in control of their lives and keeping their minds closed. What kind of doubt do you have?'

Timothy Keller. Hidden Christmas, p.83.  

THINKING BY WRITING

'How do I know what I think until I see what I say...'
EM Forster in Mark Edmundson, Why Write? A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters, p.xvii. 

THINKING IS COMMUNAL

'To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound like more like people I approve of." 

This is a point worth dwelling on. How often do we say "she really thinks for herself" when someone rejects view that we hold? No: when someone departs from what we believe to be the True Path our tendency is to look for bad influences. She's fallen under the spell of so-and-so. She's been reading too much X or listening to too much Y or watching too much Z. Similarly, people in my line of work always say that we want to promote "critical thinking" - but really we want our students to think critically only about what they've learned at home and in church, not about what they learn from us.' 

Alan Jacobs, How to Think, p.37. 

THE CHALLENGE OF THINKING

'Human beings are not built to be indifferent to the waves and pulses of their social world. For most of us the question is whether we have even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull on the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.'  

Alan Jacobs, How to Think, p.23. 

THE PROBLEM WITH THINKING

'Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?' 

Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Guide for the Perplexed, p.17. 

ATTENTION MANAGEMENT

'Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counselling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention in the sine qua non of the good life and the key to virtually every aspect of your experience.' 

Winifred Gallagher in Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, p.77. 

THE MIND

'...the thinking mind has a professional hazard. If it is not engaged in its primary task of reason, given half a chance it fizzes and boils with obsessive thoughts and feelings. There are, however, deeper demands, deeper encounters of life, love, and God, and there is far more to being alive than riding breathlessly around in the emotional roller coaster of obsessive thinking.' 

Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land, p.27. 

THINKING & FEELING

'...feeling and thinking are like two hands with which we grasp the world and that together serve us in gaining knowledge. Just as without good thinking we are prone to inappropriate feelings, so without our feelings we are actually incapable of proper feeling.' 

Michael Jensen, 'On Being Moved: A Theological Anthropology of the Emotions' in True Feelings: Perspectives on emotions in Christian life and ministry,  p.182. 

WRITING

'Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas. I find that this in no way limits my freedom as a writer and that it increases rather than decreases my vision. It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well if you are observing cells under a microscope  It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing. I don't write to bring anybody a message, as you know yourself that this is not the purpose of the novelist; but the message I find in the life I see is a moral message.' 

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p.147. 

THINKING

'I doubt if your interests get less intellectual as you become more deeply involved in the Church, but what will happen is that the intellect will take its place in a larger context and will cease to be tyrannical, if it has been - and when there is nothing over the intellect it usually is tyrannical. Anyway, the mind serves best when it's anchored in the word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity...'

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p.134.

THINKING

'...where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much...'

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: an english professor's journey into Christian faith, p.3. 

THINKING

'...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how  and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.'

David Foster Wallace in Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, p.85.

THINKING

'Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.20.