Beth Anne > Recent Status Updates

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

I thought about how silence in an elevator with strangers was excruciating, even just for ten seconds, but with [a friend] hours could pass with ease.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Book doctor. I could write literary prescriptions, give people books that might speak to how they were hurting. Language as a balm for emotional wounds. Words as anchors when people felt adrift. I wasn’t going to solve anything necessarily, but I could always make things a little better than they were before.

Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a contemplation of good and evil rather than a discussion of actual solutions to real problems.

Honor mattered, even when no one saw it.

How can I depend on anyone if they can’t depend on me?

Journalists are not perfect, any more than people in other vocations are not perfect, but the work of people who adhere to journalistic ethics is of a different quality than those who do not.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle; the biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and to judge the intentions of others.

When you don’t talk, you end up thinking and that’s where the trouble starts.

She had a positive horror of bad work done in a good cause, believing fervently that it did no good and much harm. (It’s regrettable that we can’t hear her opinions on, say, the state of modern Christian filmmaking.)

"I want to suggest to you this morning that the Church is an infinite game," Winans said. "But the believer will be tempted to approach the Church in a finite way."

I think we'd all do well to remember: God's plan for the ages has nothing to do with America. We need Him. He doesn't need us.

Can we really expect Americans to take lessons on virtue from a president who brags about grabbing women by their vaginas?...Evangelicals can rationalize all of this—going on about "binary decisions" and "the lesser of two evils" until they convince themselves it's true—but the unwillingness to demand and enforce a higher standard has sapped their arguments of moral urgency.

Christianity is inherently countercultural. That's how it thrives. When it tries to become the dominant culture, it becomes corrupted. That's been the case from the very beginning.

How can Christianity accommodate itself to such appalling anti-Christian conduct? and once you get to a point where you can say anybody's conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point?

Today's evangelicalism preaches bitterness toward unbelievers and bottomless grace for churchgoing Christians, yet the New Testament model is exactly the opposite, stressing strict accountability for those inside the Church and abounding charity to those outside it.

Unsavory alliances would need to be forged. Sordid tactics would need to be embraced. The first step toward preserving Christian values, it seemed, was to do away with Christian values.

“They need help to understand that you can care for your country without worshipping your country,” Bacote said. “They also need help to understand that you can care for your country and seek good for your neighbors. Just because other people are getting something, doesn’t mean you’re losing something.”

And who are we without hope?

You go to answers. Answers do not come to you.

Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one.

Summer’s last gasps were mixed in with the first breaths of autumn.

There was a bizarre sort of violence in having my memories plagiarized.

Later, over the years, both at work and my personal life, I have had countless men repeat my ideas back to me as if they were theirs—as if I would not remember having come up with those thoughts in the first place.

Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond control.