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.