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.

CREATION

'The formless and empty world of Genesis 1:2 - something that had unity of uniformity - becomes, under God's hand, a diverse unity. It is made good by each part being made different. Over the six days, it becomes a world where things aren't so much like each other as they are for each other. Like a wonderful machine, a complex ecosystem or a human body, the parts all fit each other.' 

Rory Shiner, One Forever: The Transforming Power of Being in Christ, p.17. 

GENESIS

'As for Eden. I think most Christians, except the v. simple and uneducated or those protected in other ways, have been rather bustled and hustled now for some generations by the self-styled scientists, and they've sort of tucked Genesis into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the house, don't you know, when the bright clever young people called: I mean, of course, even the fidelis who did not sell it secondhand or burn it as soon as modern taste began to sneer. In consequence they have indeed (myself as much as any), as you say, forgotten the the beauty of the matter even "as a story."'

JRR Tolkien in Humphrey Carpenter (Ed.), The Letters of JRR Tolkien, p.109.