Jen

“Evangelicals love the Bible. They live their entire lives by it. But they have hugged the Bible so tightly that they have suffocated it.”
― Jon Ward, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation

“I see charismatics—people I know well and love—scrounging around in the Old Testament and making preposterous claims about Donald Trump being some kind of modern-day Cyrus. Please. Do these people not have a New Testament? Don’t they know that God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead and exalted him to his right hand? Don’t they know that God has given dominion over the nations to his exalted Son? Don’t they know that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to King Jesus? God may have occasionally worked his will through pagan kings in the world before Christ, but we’re now living in Anno Domini—the year of our Lord. If you’re looking for God to work his will through a pagan king (who will always coincidently belong to your political party!), I’m thinking you haven’t spent much time seriously reading and digesting the New Testament epistles. God is no longer raising up pagan kings to enact his purposes, God has raised Jesus from the dead, and the fullness of God’s purposes are accomplished through him!”
― Brian Zahnd, Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

“And don’t forget, the Son of God himself spent his entire life on earth far from the mountaintop. . . . He was persecuted and punished by a “mountain king” named Pilate and executed next to a thief. When he rose, he appeared not to Caesar but to a small band of ordinary men and women who would become martyrs, not rulers. Christ prevailed . . . not by fighting from the commanding power of the heights, but by fighting from “utterly different terrain.” When scripture calls Christians to “take up your cross and follow me,” it’s declaring . . . that “our mountain is Golgotha”—the dusty Israeli hill where Christ was crucified.”
― Jon Ward, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation

“Man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; [the Lakota] knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. —LUTHER STANDING BEAR (c. 1868–1939)”
― Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder