Zach

“Work matters. Quality work matters. It matters to God. Luther famously said that the angels smile when a father changes a dirty diaper. God wants clean rear ends! Of course he does.

Why does God care about such small details? Because he loves, that's why. He wants children taught, and he uses principals, teachers, and parents to do it. Not to mention all the staff it takes to run a school. God wants people protected, and he uses firefighters, police officers, and a host of government officials to get the job done. God wants diseases controlled, and he uses doctors, nurses, and researchers to take on this monumental task. He cares deeply about the janitor's work, too, for the very same reason. God wants it all, and he wants it done well. He uses people to do it. He frees Christians from working for him so that they can work for their neighbors.”
― Michael Berg, Vocation: The Setting of Human Flourishing

“You can find community at a bar. You can find self-realization in therapy. You can find tradition in Nepal. You can find wholesomeness in Utah. You can find political exhortation…well…everywhere. What you find in the Christian faith that you can’t find elsewhere…the big relief of God’s saving grace. Which is to say the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Grace is the most important, most urgent, and most radical contribution Christianity has to make to the life of the world.”
― David Zahl, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World

“There's a subdivision near us called Mill Run. By a stroke of good luck, the planners decided to line the streets with silver maples instead of those trees from the pit of Gehenna known as Bradford pears. (Bradford pears, by the way, are an abomination. I'm not using that word flippantly. They were engineered in the 1960s and because they cross-pollinate with every other kind of pear tree, their prolific offspring is destroying forests faster than kudzu. I think of them as a tree version of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. They're preferred by developers because they're cheap, they grow fast, and they produce malodorous but pretty white flowers in the spring, which happens to be when most home sales happen. But after the developers leave, the trees require regular pruning, a gust of wind can split them in half, and they're producing an inhospitable forest of non-native offspring that's riddled with thorns. Left unchecked, they'll soon overtake all the lovely oaks, maples, sycamores, and ashes that are native to our part of the world. Take my word for it: they're awful.

If you have one in your yard, for goodness sake, cut it down and spend $25 on a maple at Lowe’s.”
― Jeffrey W. Barbeau, God and Wonder: Theology, Imagination, and the Arts

“There are some Statues that I love more than the rest. The Woman carrying a Beehive is one. Another - perhaps the Statue that I love above all others - stands at a Door between the Fifth and Fourth North-Western Halls. It is the Statue of a Faun, a creature half-man and half-goat, with a head of exuberant curls. He smiles slightly and presses his forefinger to his lips. I have always felt that he meant to tell me something or perhaps to warn me of something: Quiet! he seems to say. Be careful! But what danger there could possibly be I have never known. I dreamt of him once; he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi