Jose Ovalle > Recent Status Updates

I sincerely doubt that my child will be potty trained after having him listen to this book but let’s see

I think I messed up thinking Robinson wrote happy stories after reading Gilead

“She wished it mattered more that the three of them loved one another. Or mattered less, since guilt and disappointment seemed to batten on love.”

“What a strange old book [the Bible] was. How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance.”

What an absolutely terrifying time

“The invisibly of the effects of our choices is perhaps our greatest luxury”

“If you announced to your neighbors that you were a light to the nations, they would keep an eye on you. But suddenly, when we leap up to the level of the nation-state, all of this otherwise offensive behavior becomes (allegedly) patriotic. Can we really believe that this is so?“

“Insomuch as human beings are not machines, nor merely the sum of their physical appetites, the unbridled pursuit of efficiency and avidity on behalf of more money is not a ruling purpose worthy of our obedience, nor one conducive to cultural or psychological coherence, and no society can long survive its conversion to such dehumanizing lies”

“A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all Christendom and engendering in the citizens a disregard for human life and the rights of others, dangerous to society”

You wonder how sick a society has to be in order to have it cut social benefits in order to have the worlds first trillion dollar military budget

“For example, the homo œconomius, the creature who makes all decisions based on a comparison of bundles of utilities rooted in pure self-interest, is as much a mythical creature as the minotaur or the unicorn; starting with this mythical creature, you can only create a mythical economics.” 😤

“For all politics and, for that matter, economics must make a fundamental choice: they can either be a quest for a common good among diverse interests or a lust for power by which one faction seeks to dominate all the others.”

“People with local attachments, by contrast, will ask the question that never gets injected into national debates over war and peace: What are the domestic costs of this crusade? Loving their block, they will not wish to bomb Iraq. Loyal to a neighborhood, they will not send its young men and women across the sea to kill and die for causes wholly unrelated to local life.“

I feel like I need to read 60 more books on the civil war. What a horrible, horrible, war

“Humility is not when man believes he has some power but does not boast about it, it is when he truly knows himself to be a man whose only recourse is to humble himself before God”

“[Pastors] souls are crowded with all who have made their way deep inside. And of course, there is also the nagging presence of those holy words that will not go away. This is how pastors love their congregations — they take them into their souls, where they carry on both sides of a conversation between the people and their God.”

“We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills”

“Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children… Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return”

“For we cannot reflect on our earlier origin or the purpose of our creation without being pricked and goaded into thinking about God's eternal kingdom. Yet this awareness can do nothing to lift our spirits; it ought instead to humble and chasten us. What is our origin? Is it not the thing from which we have fallen?”

Robinson is good at making my heart hurt

“Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother, and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse. Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips, and then all of them went down the road to our house”

Mind blowing so far

“Pastors aren’t afforded the luxury of skimming over the top of their own losses, thinking, “That was no big deal.” The big deal is learning how to dig through loss to find the hints of hope — not a cheery optimism, but deep, from-the-bottom-of-the-soul hope. After years of excavation through their own losses, pastors learn how to find this sacred subtext in others.“

“When the music ended and his voice could be heard, he said through his burned mouth: “We are little children, Abi.”

“The highest love is given without thought of cost or reward—anything less is not love.” “Not love? Ha!” “I should correct myself: at its best, anything less is training for the real thing. At its worst, it is destructive illusion.”

“Of man, the creature most blessed, most beautiful, and yet most capable of destroying, there is much to say. That he fell, and fell most grievously in a headlong plunge toward the bottomless dark, is now known by few. That he is rising of his own accord, in inexorable ascent to power and glory, is believed by many and is a feature of his continued descent.”

This book is Catholic but it offers such a detailed account of how liberalism creeps into churches. So many emotions.

“I am not prompted to such rash devotion by the faith you want from me. Though, perhaps it is a kind of faith, a return to the beginnings to see if what was lost may again be found. In solitude, in exile, we come to know what cannot otherwise be known; we remember what we saw and see it for the first time”

Why don’t reformed people write fiction lol