Marvin Olasky > Quotes

“Truth leads to Freedom, yet freedom does not necessarily lead to truth.”
― Marvin Olasky

“My experience of being on the receiving end of gotcha stories in 2000 probably has some long-term effect. On July 2, 2021, I reiterate to readers that we will not conform to the prevailing school of journalistic marketing and its two-word formula: anger sells.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“He will remain as publisher, with authority over the business aspects. He agrees that we will have a wall of separation between the editorial and business sides, so journalists don’t feel pressure to please advertisers or donors.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Once a person starts on that path, though, it’s hard to get off. Another promotion opportunity, or some other reason to wait, will always come. So off I go: with scholarly prose but vivid detail from nineteenth-century newspapers, here come eight more academic journal articles and a history book spotlighting gutsy stories like the New York Times undercover investigation of abortion businesses in 1871.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Burroughs says we should learn patience: “When God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus, how do you know how many things depend upon this thing? God may have some work to do . . . that depends on this passage of providence that falls out this day.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“In Asheville I often visited Nat Belz, who with his older brother Joel created World magazine in 1986 in a basement office. The Belz brothers’ magazine was a labor of love, like the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Charles Hodge and Louis Berkhof are the authors of two classics entitled Systematic Theology that I read soon after becoming a Christian almost fifty years ago. Hodge wrote of “a divine influence of the Spirit granted to all men.” He said both the Bible and experience show that “common grace” brings about whatever “decorum, order, refinement, and virtue [exists] among men.” Berkhof said “common grace” means that “sinful man still retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the difference between good and evil, and shows some regard for virtue and for good outward behavior.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“realize that my mind works inductively more than deductively: instead of starting high on the ladder of abstraction with “why” and then working my way down, I work my way up from the who, what, when, and where.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Suddenly, my email and media feeds were full of sweet notes from former students and interns, readers of my columns and books, and others. I saw the moral of It’s a Wonderful Life: one life touches so many others.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Do I sound a bit wistful? More than a bit. These good developments after the King’s College disappointment affirm Jeremiah Burroughs’s contention in The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment that “nothing befalls you but there is a hand of God in it. . . . When a certain passage of providence befalls me, that is one wheel, and it may be that if this wheel were stopped, a thousand other things might come to be stopped by this.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Despite gargantuan efforts and small errors here or there, no one has shown evidence that would have overturned the results of the 2020 presidential election in even a single state.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“A few columns are good, but all too common they are blasts at “the hypocrisy of our ruling class” with sentences like this one: “The champions of social justice, equality, fairness, and feminism contradict each with the self-deluded lies they peddle to those who they believe will listen with supple attention.” Oh.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“From that research, I learn that until the late 1800s American journalists typically have a Bible-based understanding that objective truth exists. They try to describe the objective reality of God’s world. That changes as journalists come to believe at street level what Friedrich Nietzsche propounds philosophically: God is dead and everything is subjective, the result of power configurations.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Christianity’s teaching that we cannot save ourselves is different from that of all the other major religions. In debates I have with atheists Peter Singer and Christopher Hitchens in 2004 and 2007, I see they view all religions as attempts to climb up to God. They don’t see Christianity’s distinctiveness as the faith where God comes down.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Overall, I’ve learned to take some chances, humanly speaking, in the knowledge that God is the Lord of mercy, not a gotcha god. Some Sunday school classes treat the Bible as a series of exemplary lives, but it’s more a saga of God relentlessly pursuing his children, rescuing us despite our unfaithfulness. The Bible’s record of dysfunctional families teaches us to lament but also repent.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“The principle of nonattachment in Hinduism and Buddhism fascinates my students, who think it’s cool not to be attached to material possessions—but they’re surprised about extending nonattachment to relationships as a way of freeing ourselves from suffering.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir

“Oliver Dyer, calculated that if all of New York’s post-Civil War liquor shops (5,500), houses of prostitution (647, by his count), gambling halls, and other low-life establishments were placed for a night on a single street, they would reach from City Hall in lower Manhattan to White Plains thirty miles away, with a robbery every 165 yards, a murder every half mile, and thirty reporters offering sensational detail.4”
― Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion

“We do not see politics as ultimate, so we don’t sacrifice evangelical witness to election desires.” World, in keeping with the Bible’s emphasis on the poor, including widows, orphans, prisoners, and sojourners, focuses attention on “uns”—the unborn, the uneducated, the unemployed, the unhoused, the unhealthy, and the undocumented.”
― Marvin Olasky, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment, A Memoir