Neil > Recent Status Updates

"Never fear robbers or murderers. Those are dangers that come from without. Small dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers. Vices are the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Never mind what endangers our life or our purse! Let's be mindful only of what endangers our soul."

"If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. And they must be connected. There must be an organic unity between them."

"Joy cannot be commanded, purchased or arranged. But there is something we can do. We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs. We can decide to live in the environment of a living God and not our own dying selves. We can decide to center ourselves in the God who generously gives and not in our own egos which greedily grab."

"If we stay at home by ourselves and read the Bible, we are going to miss a lot, for our reading will be unconsciously conditioned by our culture, limited by our ignorance, distorted by unnoticed prejudices."

"The Swifts did not arrange their library by genre, like some book collectors, or by author and title, like other book collectors, or by color, like misguided interior decorators."

If my foundation for knowing my place, purpose, and end in this world is on the basis of a self-discovered hidden identity that only I can verify and properly know, and that others are obligated to accept by virtue of being outside of me and therefore are unable to judge, there is less space for collective human flourishing.

An Australian enters, and in the space of one page says every phrase that Americans assume Aussies say all the time.

I really need George and Anne Edwards to fall off the face of the earth if I'm going to make it through this book. They can't possibly continue being in the story for much longer, can they?