“Not one of those men had ever suggested that a person could be ‘called to anything but ‘full-time Christian service,’ by which they meant either the ministry or the ‘the mission field’” (Jayber Crow, 43).
You can be called to anything in which you can love.
“Once I had the reputation, so long as I continued to talk up to it, I did not have to live up to it” (Jayber Crow, 41). Boy, Jayber, didn’t I know that feeling in high school! I bet it’s common to high schoolers.
“Well, I feel better now.”
–When the verse you don’t understand is skipped by your favorite commentary.
Before opening my mouth I always ask “Is what I’m about to say edifying?”
To which my brain answers, “One way to find out.”
“The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings” (Psalm 115:16). This jibes with my theodicy.
“[T]he presence of gender disparity is not always evidence of bias.”
— Graham Drope, “Who’s Afraid of Ludwig Wittgenstein? Explaining the Lack of Women in Philosophy”
“It is obvious that all marriages are imprudent marriages; just as all births are imprudent births. If prudence is your main concern, or if (in other words) you are a coward, it is certainly better not to be married; and even better not to be born.”
— G.K. Chesterton
“Do you feel quite happy out it?” said I, for a sort of horror was beginning once more to creep over me.
“If you mean, Does my reason accept the view that he will (accidents apart) deliver me safe on the surface of Perelandra?—the answer is Yes,” said Ransom. “If you mean, Do my nerves and my imagination respond to this view?—I’m afraid the answer is No. One can believe in anesthetics and yet feel in a panic when they actually put the mask over your face. I think I feel as a man who believes in the future life when he is taken out to face a firing party. Perhaps it’s good practice.”
— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra
“Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”
— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra •
[edit, 1/23/26: Clearly, this sentiment predates the advent of music streaming services. In the past year I have heard the same symphony twice in one day on multiple days. And I didn’t even need to ask.]
“Sleep came like a fruit which falls into the hand almost before you have touched the stem.”
— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra
…was the fact that we had only one kind of hnau: they thought this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought.
“Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood,” said the old sorn. “For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on a different blood.”
That was C.S. Lewis preaching on the virtues of diversity well before any around here was doing it.
“Be silent,” said the voice of Oyarsa. “You, thick one, have told me nothing of yourself, so I will tell it to you. In your own world you have attained great wisdom concerning bodies, and by this you have been able to make a ship that can cross the heaven; but in all other things you have the mind of an animal.”
It sometimes seems parts of our society are in the same state as Weston. And it sometimes seems I am, too. May I be fully alive in thought and morals and healthy relationships.
What is Christianity? “A Jesus-looking God raising up a Jesus-looking people to change the world in a Jesus kind of way.” At least, that’s the fetchingly simple way Greg Boyd put it in a podcast episode released back in late November.
“God speaks to us. Our answers are our prayers.”
— Eugene Peterson
Let it be true that my prayers are always answers to God’s speaking. But when I first read the quotation, which I found in a Krista Tippett interview, I read it as: “The answers we seek from God are the prayers we pray,” as if He is the one providing the food for prayer.
“We cannot be too careful about the words we use. We start out using them, and they end up using us.”
– Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places
Instead of God taking responsibility for creating, what would happen if we view God as taking responsibility for being created? That is, in Christ, God the human being fulfills humanity’s responsibility before God to present itself humbly, obedient and trusting in the face of all the vicissitudes inherent in that nature, and fulfills human nature’s calling and purpose. In this case Jesus’ death fulfills created nature, loving and trusting God within the constraints of created finitude. Christ, the God-Man, represents creation to God, takes responsibility for being creatED (not for creatING), unites creation to God, and in so doing reconciles the world to God, not God to the world.
— Tom Belt, “God takes responsibility for sin – or not.”
Now there’s a thought.
“I no longer spend most of my time with college professors like myself. I’ve traded in the PhDs for Kristi and my friends at Highland.”
“The dark paradox, then, is this: the more we seek to alleviate our loneliness through digital connectivity, the more lonely we will feel. Along the way, we will forsake solitude as a matter of course. Curiously, it may not even be loneliness as a desire for companionship that the design of social media fosters in us. Rather, it is a counterfeit longing that is generated: for stimulation rather than companionship. In the end, we will be left with the most profound loneliness: perpetually feeling a need for connection that we cannot satisfy and finding that we have not even our own company. To recap: no abiding sense of companionship, no solitude, no place for thought.”
— Michael Sacasas, “Solitude and Loneliness”
“I’m not Atlas, on any conceivable level.”
— Tom Belt, in a pithy, poetic expression of our dependency of God and others
“Next time, before you proclaim that ‘we never talk about X’—remember this only unveils how small your ‘we’ is.
“Now I know only in part; then I will know fully”—and in the meantime, it drives me my ignorance drives me crazy.
“God loved us while we were yet monsters.”
“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”
— Roger Scruton, “English Character” in England: an Elegy
“Being incarnate was an embarrassment, a design-fault that God may have intended in the Italians but surely not in the English.”
— Roger Scruton, on the supposedly English “quiet suspicion of sensuality”
“I often think our broken church/social structures reflect our homes. Families teach us that even when are different and disagree, we are one.”
Ps 148 gives us a picture of how we might ‘rule’ and ‘serve’ simultaneously. In that Psalm, the psalmist summons all creation to give God praise—all angels, sun, moon, stars, sea monsters, fire, hail, mountains, wild animals, flying birds, kings, young and old. What if our rule in creation means that we ensure that creation can voice its praise to God? And how does hail praise God? By doing what hail does—crash down upon the earth. And how does the cheetah praise God? By chasing a Thompson’s Gazelle at 60+ mpg around a tight curve, keeping its tail steady, stretching out over 22 feet per stride. William Brown follows the environmental logic of this psalm:
Is there any doubt that God delights in watching the fastest land animal? That creation’s goodness is bound up with their plight?
I know that we all have our causes, and not all people are called to protect the cheetah. But some are, and it matters to God.
—Matt Lynch, “Genesis and Endangered Species”