David Zahl > Quotes

“Our addiction to control ends up controlling us.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“What the heart desires, the will chooses and the mind justifies.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Real love does not recoil at weakness. That is where it begins.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Listen carefully and you’ll hear that word enough everywhere, especially when it comes to the anxiety, loneliness, exhaustion, and division that plague our moment to such tragic proportions. You’ll hear about people scrambling to be successful enough, happy enough, thin enough, wealthy enough, influential enough, desired enough, charitable enough, woke enough, good enough. We believe instinctively that, were we to reach some benchmark in our minds, then value, vindication, and love would be ours—that if we got enough, we would be enough.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“As my friend Sherry never tires of reminding me in regard to her fundamentalist upbringing, a culture dominated by outward demonstrations of piety will become an increasingly merciless place, full not only of self-justification but self-consciousness and fear. It will be a place that crucifies rather than forgives.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Performancism is the assumption, usually unspoken, that there is no distinction between what we do and who we are. Your resumé isn’t part of your identity; it is your identity.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Low anthropology powerfully reframes the way we approach the good or beautiful things done by otherwise disreputable individuals -- namely, as evidence of grace rather than defilement. As musician Nick Cave notes, "Perhaps beauty can be measured by the distance it has travelled to come into being. That bad people make good art is a cause for hope.”
― David Zahl, Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others

“One of the chief ways Christianity morphs into seculosity occurs under the heading transformation. As exciting a prospect as transformation may be, when it takes center stage in a person’s spiritual life, it swallows up grace and turns Christianity into a vehicle of anxiety and exhaustion.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“There’s evidence that children who are never exposed to dirt fail to develop an adequate immune system. We forget that the same holds true for other aspects of life. Those who have never experienced failure lack resilience, sometimes fatally so. Protectiveness does not always protect.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“After all, high anthropology allows people to hold their convictions—about the world, about themselves, about others—with an ironclad certainty unavailable to those who embrace a thoroughgoing fallibility in human affairs. Such certainty, whether from the left or the right, is rooted in a rational view of other people and ourselves. We have the right information; they have fake news. We trust the science; they believe lies. We are so convinced that different information will change people’s minds that when they don’t agree with our carefully crafted Twitter rant, we assume they must be willfully idiotic.”
― David Zahl, Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others

“They tell us that confidence in the religious narratives we’ve inherited has collapsed. What they fail to report is that the marketplace in replacement religion is booming.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“An old Alcoholics Anonymous truism states, “The only thing better than being right is feeling wronged.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“The radical acceptance of the accumulations of our lives is born in the giving up, the acknowledgment of the artifice. It is what journalist Ken Fuson exudes in his self-penned obituary. Having been unshackled from pretense by a public struggle with addiction and freed from performance by impending bodily death, Fuson delivered a remarkable eulogy for himself: He attended the university’s famous School of Journalism, which is a clever way of saying, “almost graduated but didn’t.” . . . In 1996, Ken took the principled stand of leaving the Register because The Sun in Baltimore offered him more money. Three years later, having blown most of that money at Pimlico Race Track, he returned to the Register, where he remained until 2008. For most of his life, Ken suffered from a compulsive gambling addiction that nearly destroyed him. But his church friends, and the loving people at Gamblers Anonymous, never gave up on him. Ken last placed a bet on Sept. 5, 2009. He died clean. He hopes that anyone who needs help will seek it, which is hard, and accept it, which is even harder. Miracles abound.9 Fuson evinces true authenticity, something close to real freedom, and it is beautiful. His prose is not a parade of accomplishments but a catalog of embarrassing details and defeats—the kind that makes a reader’s heart beam with appreciation, identification, laughter, and hope.”
― David Zahl, Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others

“At the heart of the seculosity of politics lies the conviction, sometimes unspoken, that politics not only explains everything but can fix everything.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“But the promise goes deeper. Whatever your conviction or interest, no matter how fringe or toxic, a community exists online that will reinforce it. A few clicks are all it takes to find allies who will confirm the righteousness of your opinions, as well as common enemies to fortify your tribe. It’s intoxicating, radicalizing, and more often than not dehumanizing.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“A truly high anthropology views weakness and limitation as an aberration among otherwise decent people—something to be suffered, lamented, judged, or fixed, but not something to be taken lightly or laughed at. A low anthropology sees those same hurts and blind spots as humanizing. Humor is the form that freedom often takes.”
― David Zahl, Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others

“Half the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle To think well of themselves. —T. S. Eliot”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“And nothing allows us to excuse ruthlessness easier than when we’ve painted our neighbor as an adversary to all that is true and holy.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Religions of law promise wholeness and peace, but as the preceding chapters illustrate, they ultimately deliver anxiety, self-consciousness, and loneliness. A culture awash in seculosity is therefore a culture of despair.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“...life both in- and outside of Jesusland is no longer a vale of tears to be endured until the long-awaited twinkling-of-an-eye transformation, so much as a game to be won (which everyone loses). In practice, this is the difference between being surprised by moments of joy - and personal growth - versus expecting them.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“It would be one thing if such scorekeeping worked, but it never has and never will, not where the heart is concerned. When one person’s gain equals the other’s loss, the relationship between them always suffers. We become competitors rather than teammates. Moreover, like a husband pointing out the dishes he’s done in order to leverage some gratitude from his wife, the second we harness our good deeds for credit is the second they become less good. All of a sudden, a price tag is dangling off of what was supposed to be a gift. “If I knew that you’d require a ton of affirmation and thanks, or that you’d hold it over my head, I would’ve done the dishes myself!” And that’s just the petty stuff. The language of scorekeeping is the language of conditionality. “I’ll do this for you because you do that for me.” “I’ll hold up my end of the bargain as long as you hold up yours,” we say. However egalitarian our intention, that kind of nonassurance sets us up for a life of accounting. But what works at the office runs out of gas at home.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Those who claim to harbor no regrets about their lives are usually pretty insufferable, either because they are deluded enough to deny any past wrong turns or because they look down on those who haven’t been as fortunate.”
― David Zahl, Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others

“One of the chief ways Christianity morphs into seculosity occurs under the heading transformation. As exciting a prospect as transformation may be, when it takes center stage in a person's spiritual life, it swallows up grace and turns Christianity into a vehicle of anxiety and exhaustion...Christianity itself starts to resemble a self-improvement scheme on spiritual steroids, only as reliable as the personal growth it may have produced, which we know - from both experience and Scripture - is not always that reliable.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“You cannot solve a problem with the same mindset you used to create it.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“Indeed, calling others out for virtue signaling can be a mighty convenient way not only of dismissing any public utterance we don’t like but also of signaling our own superiority in the process.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“the most pathological example being the eating disorder on the rise known as Orthorexia nervosa, a term that literally means “fixation on righteous eating.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“But when someone pays close to twelve dollars for a small bottle of green juice, nutrition, connection, and taste are not the only draws. We are buying more than novelty or even status. We are bartering for purity, wholeness, and immortality. We are climbing a ladder to the heavens. Diet has become the justifying story of our lives.”
― David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It

“But to those who have a hard time loving themselves, who feel acutely their own failures and shortcomings, and whose personal narratives seem impervious to spin—which is to say, all of us in our unguarded moments—the words of Martin Luther might sound a bit more alluring: “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. He does not give saintliness to any but sinners, nor wisdom to any but fools. In short: He has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.”
― David Zahl, Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others

“We are not called to be victors, avidly defending ourselves, our positions, our land. When we become the losers of this world, we are dear in His sight, called children of God.”
― David Zahl, Daily Grace: The Mockingbird Devotional, Vol. 2

“Once the run was over, however, something funny would happen. No matter how fast or far any of us had gone, everyone was exhausted. Spent. Keeled over. That’s when the backslaps and high fives would happen. We were bonded in our fatigue, whereas a moment before we were separated by our giftings. Physically drained but emotionally fortified, we laughed and kidded around, talked about how hard it had been. The feeling was always positive. Our shared limitation brought us closer together. A theologian might say that God has given everyone different gifts and abilities, yet similar weaknesses. This is one of the great insights of the Christian faith. The world runs after success and strength and perfection and finds that the track only gets longer, the runners more spread out. The Christian considers weakness the location of grace and unity, not evidence of their absence. You might say, then, We are separated by our virtues but united in our distance from virtue. We are divided by the specifics of our political or aesthetic ideals but united in the fact that we fall short of those ideals. We are separated by how and whom we love but united by our failure to love perfectly. We are separated by the career paths we’ve taken but united by the ubiquity of regret, both professional and otherwise. We are separated by how much we’ve gained or accrued but united in the experience—somewhere along the line—of loss (and the fear of loss). We are stratified according to how we live but re-democratized by the fact of death. If you want to find common ground with someone, then don’t start with what they put on their résumé. Start with what they leave off.”
― David Zahl, Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others