Status Updates From Five Smooth Stones for Past...

“A thing suffered is a thing learned.”

“For centuries it was the pastor’s defined task to ‘prepare people for a good death.’ It is still not an unworthy goal for pastoral work. The true absurdity, though, is not death itself, but the speaking lives so many people lead.”

“For it is always a mistake to think of the church as a subspecies of utopia. (Martin Thornton thinks that our average congregation is ‘somewhere near the middle of the book of Judges.’)”

Speaking of the Song of Songs, Peterson writes, “No book or the Bible has been served so badly by its modern interpreters…. They have taken it apart and flattened it out in explanations that are about as interesting as a sex education chart in an eighth-grade hygiene class.”