Holly Ordway > Quotes

“It wasn’t the promise of peace, or joy, or salvation that brought me to Christ, but the promise of truth.”
― Holly Ordway

“You can't fake joy. Authentic joy is the kind that grows out of the soil of pain and doubt and fear, because that is the reality of the world.”
― Holly Ordway

“Human experience always contains both pain and joy. One of the reasons we can be confident that Christianity is actually true is it allows us to make sense of both aspects of the world. Of both beauty and pain.”
― Holly Ordway

“If we, who are finite, contingent, created beings, have got God completely figured out, it makes it seem likely that we invented him...If I am ever completely satisfied with my understanding of who God is and how he operates in the world, I am in danger of ceasing to seek Him.”
― Holly Ordway

“The problem is that, all too often, people think they already know what Christianity is—and they don’t particularly want to hear any more about it. Many people have only a vague idea of Jesus, one that’s frankly not interesting enough to be worth bothering about; for them, Christianity is just one more option on the spiritual menu, and an outdated one at that.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“It is no light matter to meet God after having denied Him all one’s life.”
― Holly Ordway

“If someone can find the idea of the supernatural to be meaningful—an idea that can be grasped, that is worth grasping—then, and only then, is the question ‘Is it true?’ significant.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Lewis writes that “reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“As Lewis says in An Experiment in Criticism: “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“We are not just souls that happen to have bodies; we are embodied souls, or ensouled bodies.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Metaphors are valuable because they build a bridge between the known and the unknown. Or, to put it another way, metaphors serve the same purpose as propositional statements: to orient the reader toward reality.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“The dangers of using religious language without attention to meaning for the listener are not limited to interactions with skeptics; a disjunction of meaning can (and often does) occur in preaching and catechesis within the Church as well.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“We live in a culture that is paradoxically both jaded by and ignorant about Christianity.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Through the God-given faculty of imagination, we can enter into other perspectives, and through the faculty of reason, we can assess the truth or falsity of what we discover.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“One of the characteristics that makes literature incarnational is that it has the power to evoke emotion in the reader.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“To say “God, the Holy Trinity, exists” is a different kind of claim than saying “Winston Churchill existed.” We are making a claim about the nature of reality, not about one more object that is included in the cosmos.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“possible is itself a perspective, one that denies the incarnational reality of ourselves as human beings (body and soul) who have a lived history that actually matters.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“I had once thought that Christianity was a soft, wish-fulfillment religion. Now I saw that it was entirely the opposite.”
― Holly Ordway

“A more meaningful grasp of essential Christian concepts like forgiveness, peace, love, patience, chastity, hospitality, and so on can enable people to recognize them as vivid and beautiful truths, not just abstract theological points.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“A SUDDEN GOLDFINCH The branch is bare and black against the fog; Cold droplets bead along the twigs, and fall. The hours are passing, ready to be gone, And now they’re past, dissolved, beyond recall, Beyond my reach. A sudden goldfinch clings And bends the twig so slightly with its weight It seems as if it’s painted on: its wings  In motion are a glimpse of summer, bright, Quick, and now already gone. This moment, So brief but still so clear against the blur Of unattended time, in memory Connects the things that are, the things that were. Fleeting as it is, almost a ghost, It may be time is never truly lost.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“The beauty of figurative language, used well, is that it can communicate truth both directly and intuitively, by its fittingness of image and meaning, even if the reader doesn’t consciously understand it.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Good stories and poetry help us to see more clearly when we close the book and re-enter ordinary life.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Tolkien’s advice to Michael also contains the rather counterintuitive suggestion to strengthen his faith by going to a Mass celebrated by “a snuffling or gabbling priest”—that is, one who mumbles the liturgy or rushes through it in a mechanical manner—or by “a proud and vulgar friar.” This, he says, “will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man.”12 Why would Tolkien, with his great devotion to the Eucharist, consider that a slipshod liturgy could be “the same” or “better” than a beautiful and devoutly celebrated one? It is precisely his Eucharistic spirituality that undergirds his thinking.¶ Here Tolkien is emphasizing his belief that the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is brought about ex opere operato (“by the work worked”), meaning that sacramental grace comes from the validity of the rite and of the priest’s ordination; it does not depend on the aesthetically pleasing nature of the liturgy or on the personal holiness of the priest who has consecrated it. Tolkien had by this stage in his life of faith learned to relax into the sheer objectivity of the Blessed Sacrament, undeflected by exterior irritations or distractions—or at least he felt there was spiritual value in making the attempt.”
― Holly Ordway, Tolkien's Faith: A Spiritual Biography

“Some smart folk wish to love Jesus, but prefer to ignore his bride, the Church. This goes no better for these rude people than it does when any loving husband meets a boor who condescends, ignores, or insults his beloved.”
― Holly Ordway, Not God's Type

“Its helpful to know the reasons for our faith...it helps us not be so vulnerable to doubt, and it helps us not be so vulnerable to false doctrine.”
― Holly Ordway

“Understanding is more than knowing facts; it requires putting those facts together and grasping their meaning”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Once language becomes routinely distorted, it becomes increasingly easy to justify and promote evil”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“IMAGINATIVE literature is a particularly valuable means of creating meaning for ideas, as well as for conveying these ideas to people who would be resistant to them if presented as arguments.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs.”
― Holly Ordway, Tolkien's Faith: A Spiritual Biography

“Metaphor is a literary device, just like rhyme is a literary device; as such, it is a means of expressing ideas that may be true or false, effective or ineffective, compelling or boring.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith