Charlie Sutton

“children equally well for success in all other cultures. If we want to improve outcomes for immigrants and the poor in a free-market, service-oriented capitalist economy such as ours, Wax and Alexander argued, it would be useful to talk about bourgeois culture.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“The Weaver”

“My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I cannot choose the colors
He weaveth steadily.

Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper
And I the underside.

Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas
And reveal the reason why.

The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned

He knows, He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.”
― Grant Colfax Tullar

“We apparently live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe,” where the fundamental forces of physics have just the right strengths, the contingent properties of the universe have just the right characteristics, and the initial distribution of matter and energy at the beginning exhibited just the right configuration to make life possible. These facts taken together are so puzzling that physicists have given them a name—the fine-tuning problem.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Lee’s reference to Missouri as a “country” hints at another widely shared conception of his time. The United States was not yet a solidified nation. It lacked a truly national identity. Other than through its post offices, the federal government had little presence in the lives of most Americans. Rather, the state evoked a person’s primary loyalty. One was a Virginian or a Georgian or a Minnesotan before one was an American. Indeed, a common name for the country was plural—these United States—rather than singular—the United States. It took a civil war to forge the thirty-two states into one nation. As a former Union general reminisced, “We must emphasize this one statement which was ever on the lips of many good men in 1860 and ’61, to wit: ‘My first allegiance is due to my State!’” Only after the country added the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 did the Constitution affirm the preeminence of national over state citizenship.27”
― R. David Cox, The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Library of Religious Biography