“We are supposed to represent a Lord who came not to judge the world but to save it. Our business should be simply to keep everybody in the net of his kingdom until we reach the farther shore. Sorting is strictly his department, not ours.”
― Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus
― Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus
“Goodness itself, in other words, if it is sufficiently committed to plausible, right-handed, strong-arm methods, will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind.”
― Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus
― Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus
“We need good liturgies, and we need natural ones; we need a life neither patternless nor over patterned, if the city is to be built. And I think the root of it all is caring. Not that that will turn the trick all by itself, but that we can produce nothing good without it. True liturgies take things for what they really are, and offer them up in loving delight. Adam naming the animals is instituting the first of all the liturgies; speech, by which man the priest of creation picks up each of the world's pieces and by his wonder bears it into the dance. "By George," he says, "there's an elephant in my garden; isn't that something!" Adam has been at work a long time; civilization is the fruit of his priestly labors. Culture is the liturgy of nature as it is offered up by man. But culture can come only from caring enough about things to want them really to be themselves - to want the poem to scan perfectly, the song to be genuinely melodic, the basketball actually to drop through the middle of the hoop, the edge of the board to be utterly straight, the pastry to be really flaky. Few of us have very many great things to care about, but we all have plenty of small ones; and that's enough for the dance. It is precisely through the things we put on the table, and the liturgies we form around it, that the city is built, caring is more than half the work.”
― Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage
― Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage
“The reason for not going out and sinning all you like is the same as the reason for not going out and putting your nose in a slicing machine: it's dumb, stupid, and no fun.”
― Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus
― Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus
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