Trevor Hoffman > Recent Status Updates

“the ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. it is good to be alive. he goes to work because he doesn’t have to.”

“the innermost meaning of wonder is fulfilled in a deepened sense of mystery. it does not end in doubt, but is the awakening of knowledge that being, qua being, is mysterious and inconceivable, and that it is mystery in the full sense of the word: neither a dead end, nor a contradiction, nor even something impenetrable or dark…[but] because its light is ever-flowing, unfathomable, and inexhaustible.”

“not everything is useless, which cannot be brought under the definition of the useful.”

“one of the reasons why it’s so important to push back on therapy culture is to ensure that the people who are suffering the most from mental illness can get the drugs and therapy they need.”

“[therapy does its] best work when they push the patients being counseled to consider what they, personally, can change their own lives in order to be less miserable, more engaged with the world, and in healthier relationships with other people… when practice well, [it] will lead to growth in character.” (38-39)

“…they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bakeoven air which it rebated, the black shapes of the mounted men stencil across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.”

“All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the south skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there who is true geology was not stone but fear.”

“No finer, greater gift than that…
when man and woman possess their home, two minds
two hearts that work as one. Despair to their enemies,
a joy to all their friends. Their own best claim to glory.”

Read this last summer. Reading it again. No reason.

Discipline: “the image of the master craftsman who takes to himself and apprentice: over a period of years he offers himself as a model, provide provides guidelines, gives encouragement, points out errors, demonstrate skill, establish his standards, rejects sloppy or careless work… a personal association that makes it possible for the younger to be shaped by the maturity of the older.”

“Do we want them to grow up and rubber stamp what we have taught them, unchanged and unchallenged? Or do we want them, with curiosity and questing, to deal with all that has been given, discovering the personal dimension of a new life in Christ for themselves? If it is the latter, we must remember that there is much that our children see in us that is less than the best and should be rejected.”

“when I observed the families where parents seem to be doing a good job… One thing stands out: these parents, seriously, honestly, joyfully follow the way of Christ themselves. They don’t define adolescence as a problem and try to solve it. They are engaged in vigorous Christian growth on their own and permit their children to look over their shoulders while they do it.”

“Social media doesn’t make girls afraid to miss out, it makes them want to. More and more they want to avoid the risk, the rejection, the awkwardness, the effort and energy that real world interaction demands. The most pressing problem now is not fear of missing out. It’s fear of taking part… we simply have less need for human interaction than ever before.”

“We immediately identity categorize, diagnose, and try to control every emotion. Opening it up, it turns out, has closed down our language, reducing complicated feelings to medical labels…We are so determined to destigmatize mental health issues that we've started to stigmatize being human, having human reactions to things.”

Honestly, this is a game-changer. You, dear Goodreadser, should read this.

Klosterman is the quintessential Gen Xer. He is mean, sarcastic, cynical, he constantly insists how indifferent he is to things that obviously mean a lot to him, he is ironically detached, atheistic, and obsessed with pop culture. And his books remain always fascinating.

“The man who, determined to be free, casts off every rule, ends up being ruled by his worst impulses” (50)

“Will men never be free?…They will be free no longer than while they remain virtuous.” (Samuel Adams qtd. p.82)

“[we resist] being manipulated by our parents, pastors, and spouses [yet] we are more than willing to let ourselves be manipulated by targeted advertisers and feed aggregators.” (96)

“[God] is utterly independent. He does not *receive* life, love, light, or being. He *is* life, love, light, and being.”

“humanity, nevertheless, is not the culmination of creation, but rather humanity in Sabbath day communion with God. This engagement with the divine is what - and what alone - can fulfill the purpose and potential for the image of God, not merely as the keeper of the lower creation, but as the lover of the fathomless Uncreated… in short, humanity was created for the heavenward gaze”