Quotes
Nevertheless Tolkien’s work is great art, in large part because it reflects the passions of his soul. Tolkien’s imitators, meanwhile, can only produce banal and vapid nonsense with elves and dwarves and orcs. They have fallen into cargo cult. They are laying out the landing strip of elves and dwarves and orcs and breathlessly awaiting the airplane.
— @viverricious, “Brandon Sanderson's Wonderful Marble Machine”, slimes all the way down Substack Apr 15, 2026
https://viverricious.substack.com/p/brandon-sandersons-wonderful-marble
Practical men are no greater than their successes; idealists, however, may leave behind treasures for future generations, however contemporaries undervalue them.
— John Byron Kuhner, “The Savannah Enlightenment”, First Things, April 21, 2026
https://firstthings.com/the-savannah-enlightenment/#:~:text=men%20are%20no%20greater%20than%20their%20successes
Everybody wanna be a body builder; don’t nobody wanna lift this heavy-ass weight.
— Ronnie Coleman
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the future, the president is expected to act in the present, and the courts are expected to assess the past.
— Yuval Levin, “The Separation of Powers” National Constitution Center
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/the-principles-of-the-constitution/separation-of-powers
Commander (0–5): Make decisions for the child and explain the reasons behind each “yes” or “no.” Build a clear foundation of right and wrong and aim to move them from imposed discipline toward self-discipline.
Coach (6–12): Shift from giving orders to instilling values and offering structured choices, asking “would you rather this or that?” to build decision-making experience. The purpose is to grow the child toward directing themselves, anchoring those choices in values.
Counselor (13–17): Step back from control, set guardrails, and ask open-ended questions rather than supplying answers. This channels the teen’s drive for independence in the right direction, moving them from dependence toward owning their own convictions.
Consultant (18+): Remain available and offer advice only when asked, respecting the adult child’s autonomy. The role becomes patient availability rather than active involvement, supporting their full ownership of their life and faith.
Distilled from “The Four Phases of Parenthood” by Bob Hostetler and related commentary
https://www.focusonthefamily.com/parenting/the-four-phases-of-parenthood/
It’s a rather sexist strain of pseudo-progressivism that celebrates as sassy or empowered in future women what we deplore as rude and/or infantile in future men.
— Elizabeth Grace Matthew, “Less Gentle Parenting 14: Nice Girls Don't Finish Last”, Restoring American Adulthood, Jun 22, 2026
I have found people [are] willing to tolerate any level of chronic pain in order to avoid acute pain.
— Marc Andreessen, on the Cheeky Pint podcast (@01:32:56)
https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/marc-andreessen-and-charlie-songhurst
Nature is brutal and made less so by civilization, not the other way around. So, society really needs people who are like well-trained German Shepherds. Very few of those people will be female, and that’s okay. But all of their mothers will be. …yes indeed, boys will be boys. In fact, they will be boys in perpetuity if we let a rudderless peer culture form the norms and preferences of masculinity rather than aiming at something higher.
— Elizabeth Grace Matthew, "How Mainstream Feminism Ruins Boys by Lying to their Mothers About Masculinity", What Are Grown-Ups For?, Dec 09, 2025
https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/p/how-mainstream-feminism-ruins-boys
Wicked (and Maleficent, and Cruella) are not morally complex stories. They are morally simple stories, the only difference to the original being that they invert the roles of the hero and the villain. And thus they undermine the very worldviews they are representative of.
I call this Wicked Syndrome: a story which can only make the villain likeable by making him non-villainous, and/or making the hero a villain.
…
A story about how a child-loving peasant girl becomes the cannibal witch from Hansel and Gretel loses some of its power if the children are actually demon-possessed psychopaths who can only by destroyed by fire, the witch lives on a candy house because her dead mother loved sweets, and all of her evil deeds are actually lies fabricated by the town’s mayor. You can still write a good story out of it. You could write about perception, distortion, the power of propaganda, and using outsiders as scapegoats.
What would you not be writing, however, is a story about how a child-loving peasant girl becomes the cannibal witch from Hansel and Gretel.
— G. K. Sá Earp, “The Narrative Pitfalls of Making Villains Victims”, Making by the Law in Which We're Made, Jan 19, 2026
https://gkearp.substack.com/p/the-narrative-pitfalls-of-making
And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
— Herman Melville, Father Mapple’s sermon in "Moby-Dick"
People do not decide their futures; they decide their habits, and their habits decide their futures.
— F.M. Alexander
After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.
— Italian proverb
You may not have noticed, but we’ve invented a new mating system. It has the sexual inequality of polygamy with fertility closer to a celibate religious order. The harem without the children. The monastery without the prayers.
— Josh Konstantinos, “Sterile Polygamy”, Aporia, Jan 06, 2026
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/sterile-polygamy#:~:text=You%20may%20not%20have%20noticed%2C%20but%20we%E2%80%99ve%20invented%20a%20new%20mating%20system.%20It%20has%20the%20sexual%20inequality%20of%20polygamy%20with%20fertility%20closer%20to%20a%20celibate%20religious%20order.%20The%20harem%20without%20the%20children.%20The%20monastery%20without%20the%20prayers.
Shame is the feeling of being let in on your own secret.
— Sasha Chapin, Substack note, Nov 21, 2025
https://substack.com/@sashachapin/note/c-179845918
We have bodies and dominion for embodied souls will always happen in physical space, not mental space.
The key to parenting boys is removing the possibility for “empty calories”, i.e. faux dominion of faux worlds. Most of the time, this looks like enforcing the conditions necessary for boredom, so kids get habituated to using their energy and to innovate and make things. To learn the rules of the physical world, come to respect them, and then manipulate them and create with them. That’s what dominion is.
Video games aren’t evil; they aren’t even all that bad. Good things come from video games, especially when played in groups. But they can only be a very very small part of the American boy diet, because the high they offer is easier to obtain than nearly any other, and humans will always seek out the easy thrill first, before venturing to the harder to obtain, more difficult thrill. You want to create the conditions necessary to force your boys to venture out and do things.
— Lane Scott, Substack note, Jan 21, 2026
https://substack.com/@lanescott/note/c-203022321?r=2rwzl
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller.
— G.K. Chesterton, “Heretics”
[T]he aim of most men esteemed conscientious and religious, or who are what is called honourable, upright men, is, to all appearance, not how to please God, but how to please themselves without displeasing Him.
— John Henry Newman, “Obedience without Love, as instanced in the Character of Balaam” (sermon)
What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid.
— Celine Nguyen, “Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?”, Asterisk
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/is-the-internet-making-culture-worse?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The modern world shall not be punished. It is the punishment.
— Nicolas Gómez-Dávila
No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.
— Eric Voegelin, “Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays”
Colonisation can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions. Europeans have a long history of extensively practising this method (and this was Europe’s greatest historical fault). Now - oh, wonder! - in order to feign regret they are applying the same method to themselves.
— Augusto Del Noce, “The Crisis of Modernity”
Feminism, which began as a movement calling for the equal treatment of women, has become a device for filling the workforce with females while eroding the inconveniently un-Machine-like family unit.
…
A farmer, even the modern, industrialised variety, needs to live by the seasons, the weather and the soil. A city dweller doesn’t even need to know where his lunch comes from. In the city, we can live ignorant of our neighbours, of the seasons, of anything but our own direction and ambition.
The move, then, from country to city—the great shift we have undertaken in just a couple of centuries—can be seen as a kind of turning-in on ourselves: a radical parochialism. This is the opposite of the story we are used to hearing about.
…
We remain, I think, despite our ostensible belief in ‘science and reason’, fundamentally religious people in a religious time. We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it. This attempt is the story of modernity; the Machine is what we have created to fulfill it. When we forget the proper direction in which to aim our prayers, we will end up aiming them at the ultimate idol: our own image, reflected back at us in our little black screens. We will be kings and queens of a deceptively free world, parading through a liturgy of the self, wondering why the chaos seems to persist so close beneath the surface of this world.
…
If every society has a spiritual substructure, then every society will need its priests. Scientists have taken holy orders in the age of the Machine.
…
If our nations seem hollowed-out, if our countries seem to be prey for the Machine, surely it is because they have no soul. If people, place, prayer and the past are the ground upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these. Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easy option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the nations of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?
…
I think now that ‘the West’ is, above all, a way of seeing—a way of looking out at the world. Once, that gaze was Christian, but it has not been that way for a long time now. The contemporary Western gaze is the gaze of the Machine; of Enlightenment Man, of cosmopolis, of reason, of money.
— Paul Kingsnorth, “Against the Machine”
There are those today who speak of a ‘defense’ of the West, which is odd, to say the least, considering that it is the West, as we shall see later on, that is threatening to submerge the whole of mankind in the whirlpool of its own confused activity; … Actually, the truth is that the West really is in great need of defense, but only against itself and its own tendencies, which, if they are pushed to their conclusion, will lead inevitably to its ruin and destruction; it is therefore ‘reform’ of the West that is called for…
— René Guénon, “The Crisis of the Modern World”
In desperation, many well-off parents—who have never been taught how to intelligently transfer wealth, and sensing that great riches will corrupt their unprepared children—decide to disinherit their family, in an attempt to prevent them from being spoiled.
…
Their thesis is that being forced to return to ‘square one’ ensures that their children will learn discipline, industry, and the value of money. But this radical decision is not the virtuous one that they imagine. It is often not even effective; soon we shall see the harmful effects on family formation, psychological health, and social vitality of ‘wo rk culture’.
One cannot outsource parenting and the cultivation of virtue to the job market. What these parents are doing, whether they realize it or not, is resetting their children to an average position because this is easier than discovering how to make proper use of an exceptional one. Instead of pursuing new heights they call a convenient but premature retreat.
…
Where the ‘merit’ criterion is now applied to an adult, it usually means a single factor: ‘relative economic productivity’. The best person for the job is the person we expect to generate the most capital in the role, based on measurable factors which we anticipate are correlated with this productivity (educational attainment and so forth).
Unfortunately, making merit synonymous with ‘maximally economically productive’ also makes it synonymous with less desirable factors which might impede that economic productivity. It puts ‘merit’ in tension with moral principles, the desire for a family, ties to a particular place, and broad interests outside work. Psychopaths rise quickly.
Meritocratic institutions embrace those subjects who are transparent rather than complex, those whose achievements are easily summarized on a paper resume, and those who are willing to devote their lives to filling that paper in.
Merit as economic productivity rewards tolerance for inhuman working hours, a subservient and predictable personality type, a willingness to sacrifice youth for cramming, and compliance over criticism. It reduces ‘Man’ to ‘worker’. This is not a fate that you should desire or engineer for your children. There are far more powerful methods to instill virtue.
…
The first and central virtue to be gained through the authentic pursuit of sport is the discipline to joyfully embrace hardship and pain. The child who masters his body against sloth, gluttony, and cowardice is well disposed to later master his spirit against lust, avarice, and corruption.
…
It is not wealth as such that is spiritually poisonous, but the sense of pointlessness that can arise in a life in which man desires only what he can easily buy. This gives rise to nihilism, hedonism, and destruction.
Countering this aimlessness requires the cultivation of aspirations and responsibilities so great that money cannot buy them.
— Johann Kurtz, “Leaving a Legacy”
Popular wrongness tends mainly to point in the same direction or directions: in favor of more spending and more benefits; against taxes to pay for that; reflexively against liberalism across the board, from free speech to free trade; in favor of using the power of the state to disadvantage or humiliate the very long list of people they hate; in favor of violence and aggression until these become wearisome or expensive.
…
Give a man power, he wants more power and feels himself entitled to it; if he succeeds, that means he deserves more power, and if he fails, that means he didn’t have enough power to get the job done.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “The French Are Just Ahead of the Curve”, The Dispatch, Oct 20, 2025
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/france-macron-crisis-trump-presidency/
You cannot beat your father in chess. It is impossible. And not merely because he is more patient or experienced. You cannot beat your father in chess, because he is not playing the same game as you. In his game, he wins even if you win, because he is in you, and your perfection is his glory.
— Ross Byrd, "Chess Against Your Dad", The Remarkable Ordinary #33, Oct 22, 2025
https://theremarkableordinary.substack.com/p/chess-against-your-dad?triedRedirect=true
Worrying is akin to praying… to yourself.
— Eugene Polupan, Substack note, Sep 18, 2025
https://substack.com/@pastoreugene/note/c-157563731
Boys will always grow up to be dangerous. Only fathers can train boys to be dangerous in the right ways.
— M. A. Franklin, Substack note, Sep 11, 2025
https://substack.com/@mafranklin/note/c-154909925
The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.
— Daniel Kahneman
The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
— Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
The fact is, if outcomes have any randomness to them, something that is fair ex ante can’t be fair ex post. You can have fairness before the dice roll, or after, but you can’t have both, because when the dice land, it’s a different world than before they were thrown.
— Noah Smith, "Why do people get paid to invest their money?", Noahpinion, Oct 03, 2025
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-do-people-get-paid-to-invest
People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels—it’s very impressive. They’re cultured, they have wonderful taste, they understand all these different countries, they know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you lived in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%.
— Tyler Cowen, interview with Dwarkesh Patel, published Jan 9, 2025
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/tyler-cowen-4?triedRedirect=true
The great miracles are too big to see and the small ones too numerous to count.
— Fr. John O’Connor, letter to David Jones (quoted in "David Jones Unabridged" by Thomas Dilworth), Oct 8, 1921
https://collections.uwindsor.ca/scholcomm/David-Jones/David-Jones-Unabridged-20220407-final.pdf
For churches today, beauty seems unnecessary at best and a waste of money at worst. You can almost hear Judas: ‘This could have been sold and given to the poor.’
— J. Chase Davis, “Why Evangelicals Don’t Build Cathedrals”, Substack, August 18, 2025
https://www.jchasedavis.com/p/why-evangelicals-dont-build-cathedrals
Being a cult figure in one’s own lifetime I am afraid is not at all pleasant. However I do not find that it tends to puff one up: in my case at any rate it makes me feel extremely small and inadequate. But even the nose of a very modest idol cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
There is no sterner moralist than pleasure.
— Lord Byron, “Don Juan”
The best form of birth control is the idea that you’re so very special that you deserve more out of life than caring for a family.
Forget The Pill, we’ve got The Self.
— Justin Ross, Subtack note, July 23, 2025
https://substack.com/@squareman/note/c-138170439
Once you claim that the ends justify the means, any projected end can be forecasted and any means justified.
— Austin Caroe, Substack note, July 13, 2025
https://substack.com/@thedistro/note/c-134810153
[M]otivation is like the weather—it can change in an instant. One day it’s sunny, the next it’s stormy. Discipline, though, is like the climate of your life. It’s the steady, consistent pattern that shapes the overall landscape of your days. Weather might affect your mood or your energy for a moment, but it’s the climate that defines your world.
— Pennie M. Stewart, “Motivation vs. Discipline: Why One Will Save You and The Other Won’t” Sep 26, 2024
https://premierpotentialcoaching.com/powerful-positive-professional/motivation-vs.-discipline-why-one-will-save-you-and-the-other-wont
If Democrats did not deny fundamental truths altogether, fewer people would accept Republicans’ bastardizations of them.
— Elizabeth Grace Matthew, “To Effectively Oppose the Right's Excesses, the Left Needs a Reality Principle. It Doesn’t Have One.”, What Are Grown-Ups For? Substack, June 9, 2025
https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/p/to-effectively-oppose-the-rights
A bigger problem is that the modern world is too comfortable for the human male. There is no push factor that drives them to try. Video games and porn and weed may not be the full story, but they are cushions that soften the blow you feel when you fail to do anything. You have to have a drive, a hunger to achieve things, including achieve women, but that gets sapped along the way.
— Drunk Wisconsin, Substack note, June 29, 2025
https://substack.com/@drunkwisconsin/note/c-130398068
Our hope is not in our virtues but in their vices.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “The Road to Smurfdom”, The Dispatch, June 30, 2025
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/eisenhower-hegseth-iran-military/
I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.
— Max Reger, responding to a critic, quoted by Nicolas Slonimsky in “Lexicon of Musical Invective” (1953)
So both the presuppositionalist and the natural theologian hold that you can’t make sense of morality without God, but they do different things with this claim.
The presuppositionalist says, ‘You need to be consistent and give up on morality.’
The natural theologian says, ‘You need to be consistent with what you already know—that morality exists—and adopt a worldview that explains why the world is more than just material.’
— Joel Carini, “Why I Stopped Being a Presuppositionalist”, Jun 23, 2025
https://joelcarini.substack.com/p/why-i-stopped-being-a-presuppositionalist
‘Hobbies’ kill time, and time is all that we have — ‘hobbies’ are suicide.
— DeepLeftAnalysis, “Against Hobbies”, Substack, Jun 01, 2025
https://deepleft.substack.com/p/against-hobbies
As Jon Tyson has pointed out, secularism attempts a “reverse exorcism” –– it goes throughout society and anywhere it finds God it cries out, “COME OUT, IN HUMANITY’S NAME!” Progressivism is an attempt to “progress past” much of historic Christian morality, which it casts as outdated, repressive, harmful, and to be eradicated.
— Josh Howerton (@howertonjosh), 5:51 PM, Mar 30, 2025
https://x.com/howertonjosh/status/1906464320214417835
No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that—even those brought up in ‘the Church’. Those outside seem seldom to have heard it.
When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think that they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. … Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to Michael Tolkien, March 6-8, 1941 (in “Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, pp. 51-52)
Perhaps it is no wonder that women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man – there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; no one could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about women’s nature.
— Dorothy Sayers, “Are Women Human?”
Spiritual parenthood—whether motherhood or fatherhood—is not a cheap consolation prize for infertile or single people. It is a deep spiritual reality.
— Helen Roy, “Motherless Day?”, Substack, May 12, 2025
https://helenroy.substack.com/p/motherless-day
Our society differs from older ones in being mostly run by people who proved themselves the best at passing exams in subjects that test the ability to manipulate words and ideas, organise information into the required forms, and manage processes, rather than actually do things. Humans enjoy flexing their strongest muscles, which means this is not just what these people are good at but what they enjoy and how they see the world, and what they are.
As a result, the most powerful people in our society constantly mistake controlling the content and output of the conversation for managing the underlying reality that the conversation is about.
— Conor Fitzgerald, “Reality Bites”, The Fitzstack, July 19, 2024
https://www.conorfitzgerald.com/p/reality-bites?r=2rwzl&selection=64a12984-807e-4c0a-af81-87b0eeed4f41&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
The ‘humanizing’ and ‘normalizing’ stuff has always been irritating to me. There is no need to humanize or to normalize Donald Trump, who is as normal as diabetic amputation and as human as a school shooting. Complaints about humanizing and normalizing have built into them a set of assumptions about the moral quality of the human and the normal that are simply not supported by the facts or by experience.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “Dinner With Donald”, The Dispatch, April 30, 2025
https://thedispatch.com/article/dinner-with-donald/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Canada%20s%20Liberals%20Pull%20Off%20a%20Narrow%20Win&utm_campaign=The%20Morning%20Dispatch_TMD%20Paid%20Subscribers%20Only_Canada%20s%20Liberals%20Pull%20Off%20a%20Narrow%20Win
Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.
— Chuck Palahniuk, “Lullaby”
If being a disciple is being a learner and follower of Jesus, then a lot hinges on what you think ‘learning’ is. And what you think learning is hinges on what you think human beings are.
— James K. A. Smith, “You Are What You Love”
I must talk about God, or I cannot keep Him in my mind. I must give Him away in order to have Him.
— Frank C. Laubach, “Letters by a Modern Mystic”
Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.
— David Brooks, “The Second Mountain”
Today you are young and very much in love and you think that your love will sustain your marriage. It won’t. But your marriage can sustain your love!
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter from prison to Eberhard Bethge
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Holy Longing” (tr. Robert Bly)
[F]or some Reformed evangelicals, confronting the world with the harder parts of biblical truth has become a higher theological priority than basking in the noonday warmth of the gospel’s promises.
There is something about God’s total sovereignty, the exclusivity of Christ, or the realities of hell and judgment, that invites the scorn of unbelievers in a way that feels invigorating. Because we believe these doctrines draw the truest lines between sheep and goats, we front-load our hearts with them and even pit them against doctrines such as the lavish grace, unfathomable forbearance, and stupefying delight of Christ toward his people. Those are truths we acknowledge but sometimes consider more fitting for liberal Christians.
— Samuel D. James, “What the Success of Gentle and Lowly Reveals About Our View of God’s Love”, The Gospel Coalition, March 3, 2021
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/gentle-lowly-gods-love/
There is also a certain disrepute simply in elevating war. To call campaigns and battles the principal building blocks of militarist Persia, Sparta, Rome, or Prussia will provoke no great debate in Britain and the United States. But as architects of English-speaking political emergence, we would like to hold up some better angels: liberty, democracy, the rights of man.
Perhaps, but the barons of England went armed to achieve the Magna Carta at Runnymede, the Declaration of Independence came from a wartime meeting, and the Gettysburg Address was delivered at the consecration of an army cemetery. Force is not always aimed at bloodshed.
— Kevin Phillips, “The Cousins’ Wars”
Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four.
— Justin Welsh (@thejustinwelsh), 7:57 AM, Nov 26, 2024
https://x.com/thejustinwelsh/status/1861393866022117521
It seems the Western church has at times been more careful to avoid ‘works righteousness’ than to avoid sin.
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The capacity to set the heart’s attention on God - so basic to following Jesus is the very commodity we are losing to the ‘attention economy’, trading looking for liking and gazing for doomscrolling. But if we can’t pay attention, we can’t pray.
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We don’t get the luxury of a blank slate; there are forces — within and without — with a vested interest in us not becoming like Jesus.
Therefore: All Christian formation is counter-formation.
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Stasis is not on the menu. We are being either transformed into the love and beauty of Jesus or malformed by the entropy of sin and death.
— John Mark Comer, “Practicing the Way”
I think rhythm is way more important than pace. … I am going to WORK – and then rest – in rhythm. … When you get a healthy rhythm, it’s not ‘slow down’, it’s ‘work until you get extremely tired, and then stop, and rest, and recoup with the Lord, and then GO.’ And do that for the rest of your life.
— Joby Martin, Resurge podcast s1e10, @1h31m
American progressivism has the reputation of supporting big government, but in practice it often just tries to use government as a pass-through entity to write checks to various “stakeholders”, while preventing it from actually being able to do anything other than write checks.
— Noah Smith, “Book review: ‘Abundance’”, Noahpinion, March 19, 2025
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-abundance
But this idea of certainty is a sham, a distraction, something to turn your attention away from the only truly certain thing, which is that your time will run out. If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.
— Tom Scocca, “Your Real Biological Clock is You’re Going to Die”, HMM Daily, Oct 18, 2018
‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on-and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.’
— Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Age of Reason”
Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.
— George Saunders, “The Brain-Dead Megaphone”
The church is not getting more political; politics has gotten more theological.
— Josh McPherson, Resurge Podcast, S1E3 @30:15
For a Christian minister to be an active partisan of Whigs or Tories, busy in canvassing, and eloquent at public meetings for rival factions, would be of ill repute. For the Christian to forget his heavenly citizenship, and occupy himself about the objects of place-hunters, would be degrading to his high calling: but there are points of inevitable contact between the higher and the lower spheres, points where politics persist in coming into collision with our faith, and there we shall be traitors both to heaven and earth if we consult our comfort by slinking into the rear. Till religion in England is entirely free from State patronage and control, till the Anglican Papacy ceases to be called the national religion, till every man of every faith shall be equal before the eye of the law as to his religious rights, we cannot, and dare not cease to be political. Because we fear God, and desire his glory, we must be political—it is a part of our piety to be so.
— C.H. Spurgeon, “A Political Dissenter”, “The Sword and the Trowel”, 1873
There are so many Russians, and our country so small, where will we find room to bury them all?
— Anonymous Finnish soldier
Beware of posing as a profound person; God became a Baby.
— Oswald Chambers, “My Utmost for His Highest, November 22”
219: It is certain that the mortality or immortality of the soul must make an entire difference to morality. And yet philosophers have constructed their ethics independently of this: they discuss to pass an hour. Plato, to incline to Christianity.
…
224: How I hate the follies of not believing in the Eucharist, etc.! If the Gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there?
— Blaise Pascal, “Pensées” (tr. W.F. Trotter)
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Pensees/qpYwR3FT0-kC
…the kind of technologically-mediated existence that we default toward in the modern age is designed to cultivate ‘rich inner lives’ that absorb our attention span but sap our ability to actually do stuff.
…Men are made for the dirt. They are made to subdue the earth and make its pathways straight for the kingdom of God. They are made to make love to real brides and take real risks and give real gifts to those who come after them. In living this kind of life, a man’s inner life actually becomes rich. It is no longer empty fiction, but rather a testimony to the wondrous works of the One whose image we bear.
— Samuel D. James, “Rich Inner Death”, Digital Liturgies, October 31, 2024
https://www.digitalliturgies.net/p/rich-inner-death
The American political tradition hopes with John Adams for a virtuous and religious people but plans with James Madison for the ordinary kind.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “More Partisan Journalism, Please—Just the Honest Kind”, The Dispatch, October 28, 2024
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/more-partisan-journalism-please-just-the-honest-kind/
Manhood is the defeat of childhood narcissism.
— David Gilmore
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>In the place of rules devised by moral philosophy and religion, therapy culture has erected others, such as
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>You, your feelings, and your goals are always preeminent and in any conflict supersede those of others
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>You are entitled to total and complete emotional safety at all times, and this entitlement supersedes the rights and desires of others
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>Simultaneously, you are a totally, existentially, permanently fragile being
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>Since there is nothing that can be endured or recovered from that is not injustice, the concept of resilience is itself an expression of injustice
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>That which makes you feel better is that which is right to do
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>In any conflict between any two people, there is always one guilty abuser and one blameless victim
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>You argue, they gaslight, you have self-respect, they are narcissists, you are still growing, they are toxic, you have boundaries, they have limitations, you hold space, they stand in the way of your growth
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>Your own behavior is always a trauma response, and thus not your fault; the behavior of others is always freely chosen, and thus responsibility-bearing
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>Any of your behaviors is merely one small step on your journey, and you are still in the process of becoming yourself, any behavior of others you don’t like is constitutive of their very being and cannot change
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:t>Wanting and not getting, for you, can never be an expression of the basic reality of existence, but rather is always evidence of crime, abuse, mistreatment, pathology, injustice
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” w:themeColor=“text1” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:t xml:space=“preserve”>Everything you feel, do, and are is valid, always valid, until the end of time
— Freddie deBoer, “Selfishness & Therapy Culture”, Substack, July 31, 2024
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/selfishness-and-therapy-culture
And of course everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with today. The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realise the truth of the old proverb that he who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. As for the Flesh, you must be very abnormal young people if you do not know quite as much about it as I do. But on the World I think I have something to say.
…
The painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is not an evil. But an earnest desire for her death on the part of her heirs is not reckoned a proper feeling, and the law frowns on even the gentlest attempts to expedite her departure.
…
The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.
— C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring”
We will engage the culture less like the chaplains of some idyllic Mayberry and more like the apostles in the book of Acts. … We will be speaking not primarily to baptized pagans on someone’s church roll, but to those who are hearing something new, maybe for the first time. We will hardly be ‘normal,’ but we should never have tried to be.
— Russell Moore, “Onward”
Above all God wants to draw us into closer fellowship with Him. When our prayers are not answered we learn that the fellowship and love of God are more to us than the answers of our requests, and then we continue in prayer.
— Andrew Murray
The image of the church as an Ark floating atop tempestuous waters of destruction is one of great antiquity in the history of the Christian faith. This iconic concept of the church’s self-understanding must be recovered with vigor.
But there’s another biblically sound way to think about the waters that flood the earth, one that is just as important to the Benedict Option project as the Noah’s Ark story.
During the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews, God granted the Prophet Ezekiel a vision of the restored Holy City of Jerusalem. In the vision, a mysterious man leads the prophet into a rebuilt Temple. Ezekiel sees a stream of water issuing forth from the altar, flowing out of its openings and into the world outside. It deepens and widens the farther it spreads from the Temple, until it has become a river that no one can cross. Everywhere this water flows, abundant life follows.
— Rod Dreher, “The Benedict Option”
Man is a soldier, and Life must be fought.
— Robert Burns, adapted from “Contented wi' Little”
‘You have never tasted freedom, friend,’ Dienekes spoke, ‘or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.’
— Steven Pressfield, ”Gates of Fire”
Fundamentalists’ great virtue is that they take the world seriously—seriously enough to know that when you touch darkness, it tends to touch you back. This brochure is for those who feel like the walls of the church have thinned to the point where the darkness is seeping in without challenge. It’s an affirmation that some Christians still know that there’s darkness outside, and want to do something about it—not just to go out and light a candle, but to make a fire with walls enough to keep in the heat.
Yet, the besetting flaw of fundamentalism is that, ultimately, it tends to believe in the walls more than it believes in the fire.
— Samuel D. James, “You Can Stick Up for Fundamentalists Without Repeating Their Mistakes”, Digital Liturgies, August 19, 2024
https://www.digitalliturgies.net/p/you-can-stick-up-for-fundamentalists?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=21173&post_id=147875859&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2rwzl&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
To recognize that those two simultaneously-embraced policies were the negation of each other was to fail to understand that they were meant only to be felt, not thought, much less to be implemented.
…
Endless online connectivity obscures the difference between the self and the world, smudges the border that separates expression and action. Doing is hard and feeling is easy. Take your pick.
— Freddie deBoer, “Alice Munro is Dead”, Substack, July 10, 2024
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/alice-munro-is-dead
shape rotation can create a wordcel but not the other way around”
Sam Altman, (@sama) 4:47 PM, January 31, 2022
https://x.com/sama/status/1488267698827976704?s=20&t=6szS8iyiEpXALalEuXXRsQ
https://x.com/sama/status/1488267698827976704
When the great trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake—a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady—of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, ‘You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk,’ but used that meaner democratic formula, ‘The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.’
…
They adored the Goddess of Reason, who would appear, even when the fullest allowance has been made for their many virtues, to be the deity who had least smiled upon them.
— G.K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Heraldry”
If the operating equipment of the 21st century is a portable device, this means the modern factory is not a place at all. It is the day itself.
— Derek Thompson, “Why White-Collar Workers Spend All Day at the Office”, The Atlantic, December 4, 2019
Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment.
— N.T. Wright, “Simply Christian”
Many Christians think that Jesus saved us merely through the cross, where he paid the penalty of our sin, and the resurrection was just a grand miracle by which God proved that Jesus was the Son of God. It was that–but far more (Romans 4:25). This inadequate view conceives of the gift of salvation in exclusively individualistic terms––as a new personal relationship with God and little else. But Jesus rose as the “first fruits” (1 Corinthians 15:20-23) of the future resurrection from the dead, and as such he brings us the Holy Spirit which is the “downpayment” or “first installment” of the future renewed world and universe (1 Corinthians 1:22; 5:5; Ephesians 1:14-16).
— Tim Keller, “The Sin of Racism”
It would be a good contest amongst Christians, one to labour to give no offence, and the other to labour to take none.
— Richard Sibbes
The problem Paul highlights in the Corinthian church, particularly in his first letter, is that members of the church were using the standards of the secular world in order to judge the quality of their own church leaders. The result was a set of factions or, perhaps even better, fan clubs within the church, focused on great preachers; and Paul, being, according to his own account, not a physically or rhetorically impressive man, was being dismissed as a second-rater. We can perhaps summarize the Corinthian problem by saying that the church had developed an essentially secular mentality: the criteria of the non-Christian world that surrounded them had come to control how they thought about the ministry and its representatives.
— Carl Trueman, “Republocrat”
From this it follows that the censorship may be useful for the preservation of morality, but can never be so for its restoration.
— Jean Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract” (tr. G.D.H. Cole)
the child who whispered “the emperor has no clothes” hadn’t authored a single peer-reviewed paper on the subject smh
— Neil Shenvi (@NeilShenvi), 10:48 PM, March 13, 2021
https://twitter.com/NeilShenvi/status/1370944994568196099
The idea that there are no hard choices – that is, choices between competing goods – is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservative or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect Society, the only real Utopia, waits for us in the next life.
— Jonah Goldberg, “Liberal Fascism”
If you stopped an Israelite in the desert of Sinai and asked, “What are you doing and where are you going?” he would have said, “I was an alien in a foreign land under penalty of death, but I took shelter under the blood of the lamb, and was saved. Now I’ve been brought out of slavery, and even though I am in a wilderness, God is with me and he’s taking me to the Promised Land.”
— Tim Keller, “Forgive” p. 102
The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next.
— D. H. Lawrence
[5.1] In the morning, when you find yourself unwilling to rise, have this thought at hand: I arise to the proper business of man, and shall I repine at setting about that work for which I was born and brought into the world? Am I equipped for nothing but to lie among the bed-clothes and keep warm?
…
[8.44] Make sure you secure the present time for yourself, rather than focus on posthumous fame. Those who pursue posthumous fame forget the people of tomorrow will be exactly the same as the mortals they can’t stand now. Why do you care if the people of tomorrow say this or that, or have any opinion about you?
— Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”
One version of illiberalism holds that somebody wins and somebody loses, and that Christians, having the upper hand in terms of numbers and political power, are entitled to impose their religion on society at large, to whatever degree they feel necessary and with only those accommodations demanded by their own forbearance. (That this is a profoundly un-Christian attitude has not stopped many Christians from embracing it.) Another version of illiberalism disguises itself as liberalism, and it insists that both Christianity and Judaism be denuded of everything that makes each distinctive, that these and all other religions be reduced to some version of the Church of Niceness, and that this orthodoxy be imposed on society at large, through formal and informal means. Genuine liberalism takes a different approach: It takes for granted that people living in a free and open society of any meaningful size or complexity will have profound, wrenching disagreements about fundamental issues, and that the job of the state and of civic institutions (including the schools) is not to scrub religions, political platforms, and creeds of anything potentially offensive but rather to create a political space in which community life can be lived peaceably.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid”, The Dispatch, April 8, 2024
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/there-shall-be-none-to-make-him-afraid/
‘Avoid affectation’ is a useful rule so far as it goes, but how would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to be, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you’re earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar vices.
The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We’re taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it’s a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You’re trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you’re intellectually dishonest?
One way to avoid intellectual dishonesty is to maintain a slight positive pressure in the opposite direction. Be aggressively willing to admit that you’re mistaken. Once you’ve admitted you were mistaken about something, you’re free. Till then you have to carry it.
[ENDNOTE 13:] It’s safe to have beliefs that you treat as unquestionable if and only if they’re also unfalsifiable. For example, it’s safe to have the principle that everyone should be treated equally under the law, because a sentence with a “should” in it isn’t really a statement about the world and is therefore hard to disprove. And if there’s no evidence that could disprove one of your principles, there can’t be any facts you’d need to ignore in order to preserve it.”
…
Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones.
— Paul Graham, “How to Do Great Work”, July 2023
https://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits. He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand; neither can he rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.
— Niccolò Machiavelli (tr. William K. Marriott), “The Prince” (Chapter VIII: Concerning Those Who Have Obtained a Principality by Wickedness)
You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
— Anne Lamott, “Traveling Mercies” (elsewhere attributed to "my priest friend Tom")
I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
— Flannery O'Connor, “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”
To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.
— Martin Heidegger “The Self-Assertion of the German University” (1933)
Any time I misspell a word it’s just because I have too much integrity to copy answers from the dictionary.
— Randall Munroe, xkcd #2885
https://xkcd.com/2885
Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when he made us. A proud man is conscious of the idea, and aspires to realize it. He does not strive towards happiness, or comfort, which may be irrelevant to God’s idea of him. His success is the idea of God, successfully carried through, and he is in love with his destiny. As the good citizen finds his happiness in the fulfillment of his duty to the community, so does the proud man find his happiness in the fulfillment of his fate.
People who have no pride are not aware of any idea of God in the making of them, and sometimes they make you doubt that there has ever been much of an idea, or else it has been lost, and who shall find it again? They have got to accept as success what others warrant to be so, and to take their happiness, and even their own selves, at the quotation of the day. They tremble, with reason, before their fate.
— Karen Blixen, “Out of Africa”
Lenin’s object was power - consistency was a consolation prize for losers
— Mike Duncan, “Dizzy with Success”, Revolutions podcast, S10E102
No, the gospel is not that the good come in and the bad don’t, but that those who know that they’re bad come in and those who think that they’re good don’t.
— Tim Keller, “Series: Daring to Draw Near” Redeemer Presbyterian Church, December 8, 1996
In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, the notion of God is suppressed, but not, for all that, the idea that essence is prior to existence; something of that idea we still find everywhere, in Diderot, in Voltaire and even in Kant. Man possesses a human nature; that “human nature,” which is the conception of human being, is found in every man; which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception, the conception of Man.”
…
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. … Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.
— Jean-Paul Sarte, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, 1946, tr. Philip Mairet
https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/264/sartre.htm
Every man being thus allowed to be his own Pope, he becomes disposed to wish to become his own King.
— William Knox (British undersecretary of state)
Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.
— Stacy Schiff, “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams” p29
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.
— James Bennet, “When the New York Times lost its way”, 1843 Magazine, December 14, 2023
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
Elon Musk is good at certain business-related skills. But that’s not the essence of Elon Musk. The essence of Elon Musk is that he’s a Visionary who can bring the Glorious Future. We know this because he’s a crazy person who says stuff that doesn’t really make sense. When Elon Musk buys a company, its value goes up - maybe partly because people expect Musk to make good business decisions, but also partly because now the company is part of Musk’s Glorious Future, and therefore exciting. Employees, customers, and investors all get excited and reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. And although Musk might not always accomplish the exact Glorious Future future he promises, his companies do well and make money, because having motivated employees, star-struck customers, and willing investors is a great combination.
— Scott Alexander, “Model City Monday 9/4/23: California Dreamin'”, Astral Codex Ten, September 4, 2023
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-9423?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
We see that we are not infinite or self-existent, but creatures who depend on the world around us and on each other. Most importantly, we see that the question of how we should live, rather than being an unknowable mystery or a self-chosen adventure, is a truth we must receive. There is an objectiveness to reality to which we as human creatures must conform if we are to live whole and well. The Bible calls our response to this objective reality “wisdom.” Wisdom is real; wisdom is embodied. And it is wisdom that is obscured in a digital world.”
…
Despite the triumph of the strange new world of identity politics and sexual revolution, we in the contemporary West have not been able to eliminate our moralistic instincts. Rather, we instead discharge them under a new moral code, one that tends to replace deity with abstractions such as justice and equality, redefine sin as pure bigotry, and offer no mechanism for atonement but only a ritual by which the religious community can purge themselves of those who bring dishonor on it. … The alternative to traditional religion has not proved to be a radically egalitarian society made up of autonomous individuals allowed to define their own reality. Rather, the alternative is simply a new moral code, but one that is more fluid, less predictable, and beholden to the values of public relations and the-customer-is-always-right. Morality, guilt, and punishment have not disappeared. They’re just under new management.
— Samuel D. James, “Digital Liturgies”
If you believe that the fate of Western civilization is a bigger, more deserving object of your attention than the character of God as revealed in Scripture, the grace of Jesus as revealed in the gospel, and the people of God as revealed in the church, then yes. There is practically nothing worth breaking rank with your fellow conservatives about. Solidarity must win the day, because the day is all that can be won.
— Samuel D. James, “The Parable of Kanye West”, Digital Liturgies, April 25, 2024
https://www.digitalliturgies.net/p/the-parable-of-kanye-west
The Tao of Matty Glesias is that you never have to ask these questions. Your view of the world comes predigested, and that certainty fuels the kind of self-esteem that lets your buzz around for several decades wondering why everyone’s always mad at you. (I know the feeling.) I don’t want Yglesias to have zero self-esteem, mind you. I just wish his was taxed at a significantly higher level than it currently is and redistributed to people in need.
— Freddie deBoer, “Does Political Message Matter or Not?”, Substack, August 15, 2023
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/does-political-message-matter-or
The problem is that Americans are, politically speaking, teenagers: We expect to be taken care of but resent being told what to do.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “The New Right Discovers … Socialized Medicine?”, The Dispatch, Aug 17, 2023
https://thedispatch.com/article/the-new-right-discovers-socialized-medicine/
War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.”
…
His Excellency, after the health of the Queen-Empress had been drunk and dinner was over, was good enough to ask my opinion upon several matters, and considering the magnificent character of his hospitality, I thought it would be unbecoming in me not to reply fully. I have forgotten the particular points of British and Indian affairs upon which he sought my counsel; all I can remember is that I responded generously. There were indeed moments when he seemed willing to impart his own views; but I thought it would be ungracious to put him to so much trouble; and he very readily subsided. He kindly sent his aide-de-camp with us to make sure we found our way back to camp all right.
— Winston Churchill, “My Early Life”
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjE_4uO4Pr_AhVZnWoFHYWMAXEQFnoECCsQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgutenberg.ca%2Febooks%2Fchurchillws-myearlylife%2Fchurchillws-myearlylife-00-h-dir%2Fchurchillws-myearlylife-00-h.html&usg=AOvVaw3TFZvp-Sgo5o2u9PtHyTsC&opi=89978449
I can’t begin to answer whether morality is increasing or decreasing. But a first stab would be to note that wealth is increasing. We might expect those virtues which wealth makes less necessary, like industry and chastity, to decline - and those virtues which wealth makes more convenient, like compassion and pacifism, to increase.
— Scott Siskind, “Is There An Illusion Of Moral Decline?” Astral Codex Ten, June 30, 2023
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/is-there-an-illusion-of-moral-decline
We must guard against those practices-both in the church and in our daily life-that shape us into mere consumers. Spirituality packaged as a path to personal self-fulfillment and happiness fits a neatly into Western consumerism. But the Scriptures and the sacraments reorient us to be people who feed on the bread of life together and are sent out as stewards of redemption. We recall and reenact Christ’s life poured out for us, and we are transformed into people who pour out our lives for others. We are formed by our habits of consumption.
— Tish Harrison Warren, “The Liturgy of the Ordinary”, p. 76-7
Forgive the digression, but the phrase ‘corporate drone’ is meaningless. Drones don’t do the work in beehives. Worker bees do. A ‘corporate drone’ would be someone whose only purpose was to fertilize the corporate queen and I can’t think of a single company that’s managed that way.
— Dan Davies, “Lying for Money”
Celsus sensed that Christians had severed the traditional bond between religion and a “nation” or people. The ancients took for granted that religion was indissolubly linked to a particular city or people. Indeed, there was no term for religion in the sense we now use it to refer to the beliefs and practices of a specific group of people or of a voluntary association divorced from ethnic or national identity. The term “could speak of a particular system of rites (a cult or an initiation), or a particular set of beliefs (doctrine or opinions), or a legal code, or a body of national customs and traditions; but for the peculiar synthesis of all those which we call a ‘religion’ the one Hellenistic word which came the closest was ‘philosophy.’” The idea of an association of people bound together by a religious allegiance with its own traditions and beliefs, its own history, and its own way of life independent of a particular city or nation was foreign to the ancients. Religion belonged to a people, and it was bestowed on an individual by the people or nation from which one came or in which one lived. “Piety lay in a calm performance of traditional rites and in a faithful performance of traditional standards.
— Robert L Wilken, “The Christians as the Romans Saw Them”, pp. 124-125
Kinkade’s luridly idyllic landscapes, full of quaint cottages and glowing firelight, already hang in an estimated one in 20 US homes.
— Oliver Burkeman, “Dark clouds gather over 'Painter of Light'”, The Guardian, March 25, 2006
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/25/arts.artsnews
Extinguishing mystery is, in general, an assault against the young, and what is the internet if not a giant machine for eliminating mystery?
— Freddie deBoer, “It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive”, Substack, February 6, 2023
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-when-old-people-romanticize
Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
— W.H. Auden, “The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays”
You can wake a man who is sleeping, but you can never wake a man who is pretending to sleep.
— Indian proverb
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair
God deserves our worship for both his love and his justice. But his love and his justice are imbued with and defined by his holiness — he does not merely love; he loves out of utter purity of character. He does not merely act justly; he acts justly out of utter purity of character. If we emphasize any of his attributes above or apart from his holiness, we fashion him after our own imagining or for our own ends. His love becomes love on human terms, rather than a holy love. His justice becomes justice on human terms, rather than a holy justice.
— Jen Wilkin, “In His Image”
Just as my assurance of salvation rests in the fact that God cannot change, my hope of sanctification rests in the fact that I can.”
…
That our hearts could be made a dwelling place more suitable for the Spirit of the Lord than a tabernacle or a temple is miraculous on a scale we cannot fathom. That the seat of utter depravity could become the seat of utter purity boggles the mind.
— Jen Wilkin, “None Like Him”
The simple fact is that Americans have voted with their wallets—for more stuff, smaller families, and less time devoted to housework, raising kids, and investing in communities. It is not that a male breadwinner can no longer support a family at 1969 living standards. Rather, more women have professional aspirations, more young adults want to spend more time childless and single, and more adults of all ages prefer a more comfortable lifestyle that often requires two incomes.
— Scott Winship, “Can Men Still Bring Home the Bacon?”, The Dispatch, December 14, 2022
https://thedispatch.com/article/can-men-still-bring-home-the-bacon/
It is thus polite atheists, not religious believers, whom the madman first engages in the town square, those who wish to have their comfortable, stable, secure lives even as they have removed any foundation on which they might build such. But the nonexistence of God is not like the nonexistence of unicorns or centaurs. Nothing significant has been built on the supposition that those mythological creatures are real. To dispense with God, however, is to destroy the very foundations on which a whole world of metaphysics and morality has been constructed and depends.”
…
Put simply (or as simply as possible, given that this is Hegel and Marx), the dynamic dialectical process by which history moves forward is for Hegel an intellectual one, a struggle between ideas in the self-consciousness. For Marx, the basic pattern of Hegelian dialectic is sound, but it is not ideas that drive the historical process; rather, it is material conditions and relations. Hegel must be turned on his head: it is not ideas and the self-consciousness that grasps them that shape the material conditions of the world but the material conditions that shape the ideas and the self-consciousness.”
…
This is the point that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley understood. It was why they used poetry as a means of achieving the moral reformation of individuals and of society. It was also the point that De Quincey pressed to its logical conclusion. In a world of empathy based ethics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth. And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste become those who exert the moral most power and set society’s moral standards.
— Carl Trueman, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self”
Ultramontane means pope-centered, an attitude toward church affairs characterized by extraordinary deference to the pope and his prerogatives. (Ultramontanism was born in France, from which point of view the Vatican is “beyond the mountains,” hence ultramontane.) Conservative Catholics got pretty ultramontane back in the days of Pope John Paul II, but are a good deal less so — and that is healthy! — in the time of Pope Francis, who is seen as a right-winger at home but is regarded as a Marxist whack-a-doodle by conservative American Catholics.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “Against Fanaticism”, National Review Online, August 16, 2022
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-tuesday/against-fanaticism/
And as US tech firms adopt increasingly restrictive terms of service to comply with European laws, global social media users are being subjected to moderation without representation. Perhaps more consequential is the potential habituation of social media users to community standards that are significantly less speech protective than what follows under constitutional and human rights law, with the danger that the former will ultimately influence interpretation of the latter rather than the other way around.
— Jacob Mchangama, “Free Speech”
I would urge all of us to consider the possibility that Christian truth does not “fit” on these digital platforms. Teaching people what to think while allowing the algorithm to teach them how to think doesn’t work. It makes for computer-shaped churchgoers.
— Samuel D. James, “7 Thoughts on Elon Musk and Twitter”, Digital Liturgies, November 1, 2022
https://samueldjames.substack.com/p/7-thoughts-on-elon-musk-and-twitter
The problem is when ‘winsomeness’ and ‘empathy’ get to be defined not by our words and deeds but by how our words and deeds make people feel. ‘I will be kind’ is Christianity. ‘I will not do anything to jeopardize your good opinion of me’ is capitulation. The other problem is that winsomeness almost always runs in one direction. The ‘winsome’ folks are careful to speak respectfully and humbly to an LGBT+ audience, while they’re eager to speak ‘prophetically’ to the MAGA crowd.
— Kevin DeYoung, “Review: 'The Case for Christian Nationalism' by Stephen Wolfe”, The Gospel Coalition, November 28, 2022
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/christian-nationalism-wolfe/
He never argued with people who said anything emotional or politically convinced. He did not believe that public argument changed such people’s views, and he thought preaching back at them simply brought boredom and bad blood. But he asked probing questions of anybody who said anything interesting, and ‘interest’ was a word to which he gave a wide range. Johnny preferred people who laughed at the world rather than whined at it. He shied away from those who had adopted any ideology that blinded them to either mathematical fact or real events.
— Norman Macrae, “John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More”
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.
…
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.
…
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
…
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
…
The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
…
I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
— G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy”
But there are issues that we should think about at least a little bit that are prior to questions of constitutional theory and interpretation, beginning with the most basic question of law: Why do we write our laws down?
I don’t ask that question facetiously. We seem to have forgotten the answer — or, at least, some of us are acting like they have forgotten it or never knew it in the first place.
The purpose of writing down a law is to fix its meaning. If you are going to live under a government of laws rather than a government of arbitrary power, then you have to know what benefits and privileges the law confers upon you and what duties and prohibitions it imposes on you. If the meaning of the law is not fixed — if, for example, you insist that your government is organized according to the principles of a “living constitution” — then you cannot know what the law is, because the law is only what some judge or functionary says it is at any particular moment. A man inclined to abide by the law can never be entirely sure that he is doing so, and he can never be entirely sure that he is breaking the law. Such an unknowable law is, properly speaking, no law at all — it does not meet the minimum requirement for functioning as law.
Another way of saying this is that law that is not fixed and knowable is only arbitrary power with a literary companion and a little democratic pretense. That is not to say that there will never be genuine, good-faith disagreements about what a law means, or that incompetent legislators will not make laws that are vague or imprecise, or that the regulations touching very complex activities will not be at times bewildering. It is only to say that judges and courts are to behave as an instrument of the law rather than using the law as an instrument of their own power for their ends, however just and enlightened they are convinced those ends are.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “Why We Write Our Laws Down”, National Review Online, July 6, 2022
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/why-we-write-our-laws-down/
There are theologically faithful choices that will nonetheless weaken evangelicalism’s ability to counter media narratives, shape or subvert public policy, or cultivate conservative momentum. The local church itself is a frustratingly inefficient vehicle for resisting wokeness. A biblically ordered local church depends on plural eldership, shepherding a membership that is regulated confessionally but not socially or even politically (1 Corinthians 15). It demands the often boring and click-resistant preaching of Scripture (2 Timothy 4:2). It presents habits and liturgies that draw attention to the past and the immaterial rather than the present and practical (1 Corinthians 11:22-24). And it commends a love and preference for other people that is more willing to be exploited than to exploit.
The question of how Christian communities are to survive is not just a social question. It’s an eschatological one. To forget this is to try to impose a foreign objective onto the evangelical conscience. And it will frequently mean misreading the signs of providence and promising the church either an imminent paradise or collapse that never really comes.
— Samuel D. James, “Contra Aaron Renn on Evangelicalism, Part 1”, Jun 25, 2022
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
— Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
— C. S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain”
A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others…thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.
— C. S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters”
Fear believes God will get it wrong; bitterness believes he did.
— Lecrae Moore, “Uncommon Ground”, p. 114
A narrative of helpers and saviors allows saints. It allows people who are genuinely good, above and beyond expectations, who rightly serve as ideals and role models for others. A narrative of justice allows, at best, non-criminals - people who haven’t broken any of the rules yet, who don’t suck quite as much as everyone else. You either stand condemned, or you’re okay so far. If it has any real role models, it’s the cop who wins Officer Of The Year, the guy who’s more sensitive to violations and more efficient [at] punishment than anyone else. Turn this guy into your moral model, and you’ve got, well, the planet of cops.
— Scott Siskind, “Justice Creep” Astral Codex Ten, March 16, 2022
An epicure is particular about his pleasures; a snob is particular about everyone else’s pleasures, forever lecturing others about their tastes in music, clothes, restaurants, and their general modes of life. A snob isn’t someone who prefers Manhattan to Scottsdale — it is someone who is irritated that anybody would prefer Scottsdale to Manhattan.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “Against Truck Shaming” National Review Online, March 10, 2022
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/against-truck-shaming/
Re: “slave” vs “enslaved people”:
I think the sentiment — to emphasize the humanity of the captive workers who were bought and sold as property — is an admirable one. But … I cannot think of any instance in which the word slave would refer to anything other than a person. To write enslaved person to my eye is like writing English professor person or soldier person or poet person. A slave is a person — that is why slavery was and is a horror.
Enslaved person also sounds a little antiseptic to my ear. … Slavery is a savage thing, and it should have a blunt, ugly name. There’s no way to nice it up, and no cause to.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “Labor’s Love Lost” National Review Online, April 19, 2022
http://nationalreview.com/the-tuesday/labors-love-lost/
As in the days of Darwin and Huxley, so in the twenty-first century, the ambition of agnostics to translate values into facts that can be scientifically understood” was a fantasy. It derived not from the viability of such a project, but from medieval theology. It was not truth that science offered moralists, but a mirror. Racists identified it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others”-found no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.
— Tom Holland, “Dominion”, p. 538
Christianity — and that is its greatest merit — has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.
Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world’s history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.
— Heinrich Heine, “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany”, 1834
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
— John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”
The purpose of sacrifice is not transactional. In other words, a sacrifice does not become “worth it” only if that sacrifice yields immediate, tangible returns—with greater returns necessary to justify a greater sacrifice. Instead, a virtuous sacrifice is transcendent. It’s an expression of duty and faith that has enduring power, and that power is often not fully perceived within our lifetimes.
— David French, “They Held the Line”, The Dispatch, August 22, 2021
The Sophisticate: ‘The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.’
The Zetet: ‘Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view…’
— Marc Stiegler, “David’s Sling”
In the pre-Trump years, there was by tradition a split in public messaging. I’m embarrassed to say I was part of this phenomenon, but it was real: blue-friendly pundits like me snickered at the uneducated, while the National Review crowd sneered at the irresponsible poor.
Then Trump came along, and the media and political landscapes were re-ordered. Now there was no philosophical or political split among America’s wealthiest and most educated people. Both strains of snobbism — one looking down on the unschooled, the other looking down on an economically parasitic underclass — fused, putting wealthy America’s pretensions under the same tent for the first time.
— Matt Taibbi, “The Vaccine Aristocrats”, July 27, 2021
In post-Obergefell America, Evangelicals and other orthodox Christians will be unable to outrun our freakishness. That is no reason for panic. Some will suggest that a Christian sexual ethic puts the churches on the “wrong side of history.” Well, we’ve been on the wrong side of history since a.d. 33. The “right side of history” was the Eternal City of Rome. And then the right side of history was the French Revolution. And then the right side of history was scientific naturalism and state socialism. And yet, there stands Jesus still, on the wrong side of history but at the right hand of the Father.
— Russell Moore, “Evangelicals Won’t Cave”, First Things, October 2015
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/10/evangelicals-wont-cave
If your salvation depends upon obeying the rules, then you want your rules to be very specific, do-able and clear. You don’t want: “Love your neighbor as yourself”, because that’s an impossibly high standard which has endless implications! You want: Don’t go to movies or Don’t drink alcohol or Don’t eat this type of food.
— Tim Keller, “Galatians for You” p. 42
More meritorious surgeons get richer not because “Society” has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn’t an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It’s a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.
— Scott Siskind, “Book Review: The Cult of Smart”
It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
Still, progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them. Moral panic around race has been the answer, taking the uneasiness a meritocratic elite must at least unconsciously feel around their economic good fortune—something they could easily share with the less fortunate, should they care to—and displacing it onto “whiteness,” an immutable characteristic that one can do nothing to change.
In other words, critical race theory is the perfect ideology for affluent progressive whites who want nothing to change—but who still want to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice.
— Batya Ungar-Sargon, “The Warped Vision of ‘Anti-Racism’” Persuasion, March 10, 2021
Counterrevolution and conservatism have little in common. In the struggle against Communism the conservative is all but helpless. For that struggle cannot be fought, much less won, or even understood, except in terms of total sacrifice. And the conservative is suspicious of sacrifice: he wishes first to conserve, above all what he is and what he has. You cannot fight against revolutions so.” (p398)
Other ages have had their individual traitors—men who from faint heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by millions, in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.” (p455)
— Whittaker Chambers, “Witness”
Only if we hammer home the gospel, that we are loved sinners in Christ – so loved that we don’t have to despair when we do wrong, so sinful that we have no right to be puffed up when we do right – can we help our listeners escape the spiritually bipolar world of moralism. And secular people, even if they are inclined against moralism, will need to hear it critiqued in our preaching for two reasons. One is that they won’t even consider real Christianity unless they see it is not identical to moralism. Second, any person who is beginning to be drawn to God will automatically move toward him expecting to have a moralistic relationship.” (p. 62)
…
This is a signal example of what Taylor calls the ‘extraordinary inarticulacy… of modern culture,’ which comes from the view that ‘moral positions are not in any way grounded in reason or the nature of things but are ultimately just adopted by each of us because we find ourselves drawn to them.’ If you are proposing a position that some behavior is wrong and should be stopped, there is no way to justify or even have a conversation about it with someone who disagrees. All you can do is shout the other person down.” (p. 152)
…
Try to re member that you are at odds with a system of beliefs far more than you are at war with a group of people. Contem porary people are the victims of the late-modern mind far more than they are its perpetrators. Seen in this light the Christian gospel is more of a prison break than a battle.” (p. 156)
— Tim Keller, “Preaching”
I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it.
If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and resown.
I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up “our own” when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had.
Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.
There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot because our charitable expenditure excludes them.
The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
— C.S. Lewis
…the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to “problems” rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.
What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
— Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review, May 1963, “Managing for Business Effectiveness”
Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.
— Dutch proverb
Sometimes I joke about what I’d do if I had one day left to live. Eat junk, go crazy, etc. Today it hit me: Jesus knew. And he washed feet.
— Steve Bezner, Nov 17, 2014
https://twitter.com/Bezner/status/534368214583488512
Prayer is not the flare gun of the desperate, or room service for the indulgent. It is the confidence of the adopted.
— Sam Allberry, Oct 17, 2017
https://twitter.com/samallberry/status/920302379949576193
To those who feel “called” to dedicate all their time to deconstructing and critiquing the church, don’t forget she already has a full-time Accuser.
— Jared C Wilson, Oct 11, 2018
https://twitter.com/jaredcwilson/status/1050405448896143360
Most of us have chosen heaven over hell, but not many of us have chosen heaven over earth.
— Erik Reed, Aug 3, 2014
https://twitter.com/ErikReed/status/496099087880839168
The sun will burn your eyes out from a distance of 92 million miles and do you expect to casually stroll into the presence of its Maker?
— Luke Walker (@spiritualswords), 11:02 AM, Aug 21, 2017
https://twitter.com/dcarr8/status/899706960190218240
When work is an idol, rest will feel like a sin.
— David Gundersen (@GunnerGundersen), 9:00 PM, Sep 25, 2020
https://twitter.com/GunnerGundersen/status/1309658951697526786
For people leading more ordinary lives, reducing religion to the God Within and only the God Within doesn’t create a vast population of budding Teresas of Avila. It just provides an excuse for making religious faith more comfortable, more dilettantish, more self absorbed—for doing what you feel like doing anyway, and calling it obedience to a Higher Power or Supreme Self. The result isn’t megalomania but a milder sort of solipsism, with numinous experience as a kind of spiritual comfort food rather than a spur to moral transformation there when you need it, and not a bother when you don’t. It’s the church of the Oprah Winfrey Network, you might say: religion as a path to constant self-affirmation, heresy as self-help, the quest for God as the ultimate form of therapy.
— Ross Douthat, "Bad Religion" p230
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
— Adam Smith "The Wealth of Nations"
Marx reasoned that since profits come out of the sale price of goods and services, the wage earners who produce the goods and services can’t afford, in the aggregate, to buy all they produce. This inexorably leads to overproduction, he said, followed by collapse of both prices and employment. He thought the built-in discrepancy between wages and prices, by creating a demand gap, led to periodic cyclic crises of unemployment and price collapse, and must also lead before long to a final insurmountable crisis of capitalism, to be followed by socialism, which would eliminate the demand gap by eliminating private profits.
— Jane Jacobs, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”
The Earth and myself are of one mind. Perhaps you think the Creator sent you here to dispose of us as you see fit. If I thought you were sent by the creator, I might be induced to think you had a right to dispose of me. Do not misunderstand me; but understand me fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I choose. The one who has a right to dispose of it is the one who created it. I claim a right to live on my land, and accord you the privilege to return to yours.
— Chief Joseph
The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naive idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all.
— Max Weber, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, 1905
Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as it is with the redistribution of wealth. But you would be wrong.
— Thomas Sowell
But for the dollar to collapse, it has to collapse against something. And I heard a wise guy say that Europe was a museum, Japan was a nursing home, China was a jail and bitcoin was an experiment. That may not be exactly fair, but it captures a real truth. Which is for all our problems and all its problems, the dollar is the world’s safe haven. It’s the place that money moves into when people get nervous about the state of the world.
— Larry Summers, interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, October 18, 2020
God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.
— George MacDonald
I often ask Christians to evaluate their situation with regard to prayer by using a metaphor. Imagine that your soul is a boat, a boat with both oars and a sail. In this case here are four questions:
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>Are you “sailing”? Sailing means you are living the Christian life with the wind at your back. God is real to your heart. You often feel his love. You see prayers being answered. When studying the Bible, you regularly see remarkable things and you sense him speaking to you. You sense people around you being influenced by the Spirit through you.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>Are you “rowing”? Rowing means you are finding prayer and Bible reading to be more a duty than a delight. God often (though not always) seems distant, and the sense of his presence is fairly rare. You don’t see many of your prayers being answered. You may be struggling with doubts about God and yourself. Yet despite all this, you refuse self-pity or the self-righteous pride that assumes you know better than God how your life should go. You continue to read the Bible and pray regularly, you attend worship and reach out and serve people despite the inner spiritual dryness.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>Are you “drifting”? Drifting means that you are experiencing all the conditions of rowing—spiritual dryness and difficulties in life. But in response, instead of rowing, you are letting yourself drift. You don’t feel like approaching and obeying God, so you don’t pray or read. You give in to the self-centeredness that naturally comes when you feel sorry for yourself, and you drift into self-indulgent behaviors to comfort yourself, whether it be escape eating and sleeping, sexual practices, or whatever else.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>Are you “sinking”? Eventually your boat, your soul, will drift away from the shipping lanes, as it were—and truly lose any forward motion in the Christian life. The numbness of heart can become hardness because you give in to thoughts of self-pity and resentment. If some major difficulty or trouble were to come into your life, it would be possible to abandon your faith and identity as a Christian altogether.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>In this metaphor we see that there are some things we are responsible for, such as using the means of grace—the Bible, prayer, and church participation—in a disciplined way. There are many other things we do not have much control over—such as how well the circumstances in our lives are going as well as our emotions. If you pray, worship, and obey despite negative circumstances and feelings, you won’t be drifting, and when the winds come up again, you will move ahead swiftly. On the other hand, if you do not apply the means of grace, you will at best be drifting, and if storms come into your life, you might be in danger of sinking.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>In any case—pray no matter what. Praying is rowing, and sometimes it is like rowing in the dark—you won’t feel that you are making any progress at all. Yet you are, and when the winds rise again, and they surely will, you will sail again before them.
— Tim Keller “Prayer” p.259-260
I think that it is not the most beneficial thing to identify yourself by what you have been set free from
— Jackie Hill-Perry on Truth’s Table podcast, episode “behind the book: gay girl, good god with Jackie Hill-Perry”, question @14:28, answer @15:50, quote starting ~16:10
You will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner, because there is a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good terms with ourselves, and we can always put up a good case for ourselves. Even if we try to make ourselves feel that we are sinners, we will never do it. There is only one way to know that we are sinners, and that is to have some dim, glimmering conception of God.
— Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Seeking the Face of God: Nine Reflections on the Psalm” (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 34.
Christ was sent not to mend wounded people or wake sleepy people or advise confused people or inspire bored people or spur on lazy people or educate ignorant people, but to raise dead people.”
…
The purpose of this chapter, through reflecting on the book of Galatians, is to bring the heart of Christ to bear on our chronic tendency to function out of a subtle belief that our obedience strengthens the love of God. We act like that twelve-year-old. And our Father responds with corrective love.
— Dane Ortlund, "Gentle and Lowly"
It ought not to be necessary for me to insist that the final aims of the churchman, and the aims of the secular reformer, are very different. So far as the aims of the latter are for true social justice, they ought to be comprehended in those of the former. But one reason why the lot of the secular reformer or revolutionist seems to me to be the easier is this: that for the most part he conceives of the evils of the world as something external to himself. They are thought of either as completely impersonal, so that there is nothing to alter but machinery; or if there is evil incarnate, it is always incarnate in the other people — a class, a race, the politicians, the bankers, the armament makers, and so forth — never in oneself. There are individual exceptions: but so far as a man sees the need for converting himself as well as the World, he is approximating to the religious point of view. But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad aftereffects. It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride brings its own doom. For only in humility, charity and purity — and most of all perhaps humility — can we be prepared to receive the grace of God without which human operations are vain.
— T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society.
That which keeps men off is, that they know not Christ’s mind and heart. … The truth is, he is more glad of us than we can be of him. The father of the prodigal was the forwarder of the two to that joyful meeting. Have you a mind? He that came down from heaven, as himself says in the text, to die for you, will meet you more than halfway, as the prodigal’s father is said to do… O therefore come in unto him. If you knew his heart, you would.
— Thomas Goodwin, Encouragements to Faith, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 12 vols. (repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage, 2006), 4:223–24.
In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.
— Hannah Arendt
Anything can be made into a brand and perhaps nothing can be more easily branded than the anti-brand faux-rebelliousness of recent punk culture. If Weird Christianity is to make good on its missionary promise, then it will need to avoid the obvious danger of becoming the Hot Topic to Willow Creek’s Old Navy or Boomer Catholicism’s Land’s End, all of which are welcome at American capitalism’s table.
— Jake Meador, “Keep Christianity Weird”, May 12, 2020:
https://mereorthodoxy.com/keep-christianity-weird/
Though Coates is openly atheist, he’s discussing a truth that a Christian should embrace—that we are not noble. We are shot-through with sin. When everyone around us is right, we deserve little credit for conforming. When everyone around us is wrong, we’re also likely to fail.
— David French, “There’s a Question My Confederate Ancestors Taught Me To Ask” The Dispatch, Apr 26, 2020
Shared joy is double joy. Shared sorrow is half-sorrow.
— Swedish proverb
Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars, and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.
— Joseph Schumpeter, 1942, quoted by Matt Ridley in “How Innovation Works”
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.
— George E. P. Box, “Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces” (1987) with Draper, N. R., John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. p. 424, 74
He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.
— Cicero
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
— Army aphorism, Dwight Eisenhower quoted in The Wall Street Journal, “Meeting the Unknown”, 1957 November 19, Quote Page 14, Column 1, New York. (ProQuest)
What I spent I lost; what I kept I leave to others; what I gave remains with me.
— grave marker, paraphrased from a paraphrase by Joseph Addison
The covers of this book are too far apart.
— Ambrose Bierce
A goal is a dream with a deadline.
— Napoleon Hill
It is easier to act yourself into right thinking than to think yourself into right acting.
— Early 20th Century Methodist saying
It is easy to be critical of the micromanaging many managers resort to, yet we must acknowledge the rock and the hard place we often place them between. If they have to choose between meeting a deadline and some less well defined mandate to “nurture” their people, they will pick the deadline every time. We tell ourselves that we will devote more time to our people if we, in turn, are given more slack in the schedule or budget, but somehow the requirements of the job always eat up the slack, resulting in increased pressure with even less room for error.
— Ed Catmull, “Creativity Inc”, p124
intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society in the belief they will be in charge of it
— Roger Scruton “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands” (2015), p. 12
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r w:rsidRPr=“60EC0252”><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” w:themeColor=“text1” /></w:rPr><w:t>Among the many thoughtless labels which have gained currency, the dichotomy between the political left and the political right is one of the most striking, not only for its wide acceptance but also for its utter lack of definition - or even an attempt at definition. Only the left is defined - initially by the kinds of ideas held by those who sat on the left side of the French national assembly in the eighteenth century. But while the left is defined, at least in this general sense, the dichotomy itself is undefined because ‘the right’ remains undefined. Those who oppose the left are said to be on the right - and when they are strongly opposed, or opposed across a broad spectrum of issues, they are said to be on the ‘far right.’ But this is a somewhat Ptolemaic view of the political universe, with the political left being in the center of that universe and who all who differ -in any direction- being called ‘the right.’
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:ind w:left=“720” w:right=“720” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r w:rsidRPr=“60EC0252”><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” w:themeColor=“text1” /></w:rPr><w:t xml:space=“preserve”>Whether free-market libertarians or statists ranging from those with monarchist to fascist views, opponents of the left are called ‘the right.’ In the United States, especially, the related term ‘conservative’ is routinely used to encompass people who have no desire to preserve the status quo or to return to some status quo ante… Although the free market is clearly the antithesis of state control of the economy, such as fascists advocate, the left-right dichotomy makes it seems as if fascists are just more extreme versions of ‘conservatives,’ in the same sense in which socialism is a more extreme version of the welfare state. But this vision of a symmetrical political spectrum corresponds to no political reality. Those who advocate the free market typically do so as just one aspect of a more general vision in which government’s role in the lives of individuals is to be minimized, within limits set by a need to avoid anarchy and a need to maintain military defense against other nations. In no sense is fascism a further extension of that idea.
— Thomas Sowell, “The Vision of the Anointed” (p. 208)
While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society. In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment.
— Thomas Sowell, “A Conflict of Visions”
Never presume God will grant you apart from prayer what he has ordained to grant you only by means of prayer.
— Sam Storms
When it comes to sin, it’s kill or be killed. You’re fighting the war or you’re losing it. There’s no Switzerland in sanctification.
— Jared Wilson
All democratic peoples are conservative. The American constitution has truly earned the right to be “conserved” – in spite of everything. Despotically ruled peoples are never conservative, because they are never content.
— Wilhelm Liebknecht, quoted in “The Pursuit of Power” by Richard J Evans
Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
— D.A. Carson “A Call to Spiritual Reformation” Baker, 1992
inveniam viam aut faciam” (“I shall either find a way or make one.”)
— attributed to Hannibal; when told it was impossible to cross the Alps by elephant
Don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be misunderstood.
— William Howard Taft, paraphrasing Quintillian: “We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.” -Quintilian
Has no liberal noticed that no government is ever neutral in society’s allocation of wealth and opportunity? And that the bigger government becomes, the more it is manipulated by those who are sufficiently confident, articulate, and sophisticated to understand government’s complexities, and wealthy enough to hire skillful agents to navigate those complexities on their behalf? This is why big government is invariably regressive, transferring wealth upward.
— George Will “A New Paean to Progressivism Overlooks Why Americans Lost Trust in Government” January 17, 2018 8:00 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455523/david-goldfield-gifted-generation-romanticizes-pre-reagan-liberal-government
James Donovan:</w:r><w:r><w:t>I have a mandate to serve you. Nobody else does. Quite frankly, everybody else has an interest in sending you to the electric chair.
Rudolf Abel:</w:r><w:r><w:t>All right…
James Donovan:</w:r><w:r><w:t>You don’t seem alarmed.
Rudolf Abel:</w:r><w:r><w:t>Would it help?
— Bridge of Spies (2015)
Imagine that you are standing in a small clearing in the middle of a vast forest, and that this forest represents your ignorance of the world. The clearing you stand in represents your knowledge. As one gains knowledge, the clearing expands and the forest of ignorance recedes. But as the clearing expands, so does its circumference and so the area of contact between knowledge and ignorance also grows, and our knowledge of the extent of our ignorance grows with it. So, paradoxically, the wiser we become, the less wise we feel. This is the wellspring of intellectual humility, the Socratic realization that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, and the more apparent it becomes that your own opinions are susceptible to fallibility.
Matthew Blackwell “The Psychology of Progressive Hostility” March 10, 2018 on Quillette.com
http://quillette.com/2018/03/10/psychology-progressive-hostility/
The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.
— Matt Ridley, Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
Edited by Ronald Hamowy
https://books.google.com/books?id=ENQjPm-S7UEC&pg=PA77
https://books.google.com/books?id=ENQjPm-S7UEC&pg=PA77#v=onepage&q&f=false
People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying.
…
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
…
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:spacing w:after=“0” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:spacing w:after=“0” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>Never use a long word where a short one will do.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:spacing w:after=“0” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:spacing w:after=“0” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>Never use the passive where you can use the active.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:spacing w:after=“0” /></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr></w:pPr><w:r w:rsidRPr=“74D96161”><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” w:themeColor=“text1” /></w:rPr><w:t>Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
…
— George Orwell
politics and the English language, 1946
We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, “Law in Science and Science in Law”, 12 Harv. L. Rev. 443, 460 (1899)
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:spacing w:after=“200” w:line=“276” w:lineRule=“auto” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>“To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.”
You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned too, even when they’re wrong, and that they’re not always wrong.
— Yuval Levin, Bradley Prize Remarks, June 12, 2013
https://eppc.org/publications/yuval-levins-bradley-prize-remarks/
Ideas have consequences, and words are the clothing that ideas wear in public. If you disable the words we use to distinguish ideas, you make it harder for people to tell them apart.
— Dan McLaughlin, @baseballcrank,
https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/995024575162351616?s=20
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair…the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
— Dorothy L. Sayers
One of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.
— George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1942)
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
— Stephen King
<w:left w:val=“nil” /><w:bottom w:val=“nil” /><w:right w:val=“nil” /><w:between w:val=“nil” /></w:pBdr><w:spacing w:after=“200” w:line=“276” w:lineRule=“auto” /><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr></w:pPr><w:r><w:rPr><w:color w:val=“000000” /></w:rPr><w:t>“A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
— Alexander Pope, “Thoughts on Various Subjects” (1727), published in “Swift's Miscellanies” (1727)
A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.
— Edmund Burke “the writings and speeches of Edmund burke” 8: 206
Habits are for lazy people. And you are lazy. We all are. Habits are shortcuts to getting a whole lot of things done without spending too much of your finite supply of willpower. So use em.
— Rufus Griscom, “Unsolicited Advice for My Three Sons, In No Particular Order”
https://medium.com/@rufybaby/unsolicited-advice-for-my-three-boys-in-no-particular-order-9f31c0394404
https://medium.com/@rufybaby/unsolicited-advice-for-my-three-boys-in-no-particular-order-9f31c0394404#.nmdh2wgcy
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.
— Wendell Berry, “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays” ("Feminism, the Body, and the Machine")
… cultural acceptance can go two ways. One is simply conceding on certain points in order to gain favor with the society. However, the other side to this is making it an aim to persuade the culture of the merits of your own views. The first assumes that we must yield to gain influence. The latter assumes that we can get them to yield. Both place an incredibly high value on getting the culture to accept and embrace us, something to which we have not been called, nor has it been promised to us.
— user Kenton commenting on “We're Not the Ones God Has Been Waiting For” by Daniel Darling
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/03/14/were-not-the-ones-god-has-been-waiting-for/?comments
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/03/14/were-not-the-ones-god-has-been-waiting-for/?comments#comments
Until we can receive with an open heart, we’re never really giving with an open heart. When we attach judgment to receiving help, we knowingly or unknowingly attach judgment to giving help
— Brené Brown, “The Gifts of Imperfection”
Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.
— Leon Kass
If the universe was found to be finite or infinite, either discovery would be equally stupefying and impenetrable to me.
— Christopher Hitchens, “god is not Great”
I am distressed to find that some women friends (fortunately not many) treat the use of the impersonal masculine pronoun as if it showed intention to exclude them. If there were any excluding to be done (happily there isn’t) I think I would sooner exclude men, but when I once tentatively tried referring to my abstract reader as ‘she’, a feminist denounced me for patronizing condescension: I ought to say ‘he-or-she’, and ‘his-or-her’. That is easy to do if you don’t care about language, but then if you don’t care about language you don’t deserve readers of either sex. Here, I have returned to the normal conventions of English pronouns. I may refer to the ‘reader’ as ‘he’, but I no more think of my readers as specifically male than a French speaker thinks of a table as female.
— Richard Dawkins, “The Blind Watchmaker”
There are actually only ever two pastoral problems you will ever encounter. The first is this: persuading those who are under the dominion of sin that they are under the dominion of sin. That’s the task of evangelism. And [second], persuading those who are no longer under the dominion of sin that they are no longer under the dominion of sin because they’re Christ’s.
— Sinclair Ferguson, paraphrasing John Owen from his book, “A Treatise of the Dominion of Sin and Grace”
He that serves God for money will serve the devil for better wages.
— Roger L’Estrange
Either God exists or He does not, but if He does not, nothing and no one else can take His place.
— Arthur Leff
The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone.
— John Stott, “The Cross of Christ”
Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.
I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?
— John Stott
Many people say, “I can’t believe in god when I see all the injustice in the world.” But here is Jesus, the Son of God, who knows what it’s like to be the victim of injustice, to stand up to power, to face a corrupt system and be killed for it. He knows what it is like to be lynched. I’m not sure how you believe in a God remote from injustice and oppression, but Christianity doesn’t ask you to believe in that.
— Tim Keller
It’s when you’re feeling strong that you should fight the hardest. In other words, kick sin when it’s down. You don’t have to fight like a gentleman here. Redouble your grace-motivated efforts. Keep “backing up” your definition of on-line compromise. Memorize Scripture. Pray for Gods power. By doing so you’ll weaken the power of this sin in your life even more.
— Josh Harris
Lukewarm people do not live by faith; their lives are structured so they never have to.
— Francis Chan “Crazy Love”
God never accepts me ‘as I am.’ He accepts me ‘as I am in Jesus Christ.’ The center of gravity is different. The true Gospel does not allow God’s love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul’s lust for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people - what the Bible calls ‘fear of the Lord’ and ‘faith’ - to look outside themselves.
— CJ Mahaney
To say ‘Preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.’ is about the dumbest thing that you could ever say. That’s like saying ‘Tell me your phone number. If necessary, use digits.’
— JD Greear
We strive against God’s all-sufficient glory if we think we can become a means to His end without making joy in Him our end.
I don’t know how people pray who don’t believe in the sovereignty of God to do the impossible. Because all the things I want to happen are impossible. If they’re possible I’ll do them.
— John Piper
The battle of prayer is against two things in the earthlies: wandering thoughts and lack of intimacy with God’s character as revealed in His word. Neither can be cured at once, but they can be cured by discipline.
— Oswald Chambers
The only proof of past conversion is present convertedness.
— JI Packer
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
— Confucius
Out of 100 men, one will read the Bible, the other 99 will read the Christian.
— D.L. Moody
When it comes down to it, many of us do not really want to be led by the Holy Spirit. Or, more fundamentally, many of us don’t want to be led by anyone other than ourselves. The whole idea of giving up control (or the delusion of it) is terrifying, isn’t it?
So, if you say you want the Holy Spirit, you must first honestly ask yourself if you want to do his will. Because if you do not genuinely want to do his will, why should you ask for his presence at all? But if you decide you do want to know his will, there will be moments when you have to let go of the fear of what that might mean – when you have to release your grip of control on your life and decide to be led, come what may.
Don’t let your personal baggage keep you from enjoying this intimacy that both your spirit and God’s long for. I had issues that kept me from crying out to Abba. I often wished my testimony was like those of the drug addicts or criminals who came to know the Lord and then completely changed their lifestyles. Unlike them, I was raised in a Christian home and came to know Jesus personally in high school. After several years of walking with Him, I began to run. I went through my sinful phase after knowing better and after having received the Holy Spirit. I quenched the conviction the Holy Spirit put in my heart over and over again. I can totally relate to the prodigal son after he squandered his wealth (Luke 15:11-32). I resonate with the feelings he had when he was eating with the pigs, thinking he could go back to the father as a slave. Sometime I waited a few days or even weeks before talking to Him because I wanted to have a period of proving myself. In doing this I acted like a slave and obeyed as well as I could. I figured I could still serve him even though I felt uncomfortable having a real conversation with him.
Have you ever felt this way? Do you ever want to distance yourself from him because you feel so much shame over your sin?
This was a regular pattern for me. I wanted to prove that I was sorry for what I did by being faithful for a period of time. I wanted to develop a good track record before pursuing my relationship with Him again. I wanted God to see that I could be a good servant. Then I felt good enough to talk to God again. But God didn’t want a good slave who tried really hard. He wanted me to see that he was a good Father. He wants intimacy.
It takes faith to believe God is truly like the prodigal son’s father, who from afar “saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). Lest there be any doubt, the father made it absolutely clear that his son was to be forgiven, with no questions asked. He invited his son back into his life without bitterness or requiring penance and guilt.
In the same way, the spirit speaks truth to our hearts, such as “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1, NIV) and “[nothing will be able to separate us for the love of god that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:39 NIV) and “He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9 NASB). These are verses we could probably spout off, but often we need reminding of the power and veracity of them. And one of the Holy Spirit’s roles is to do this reminding.
— Francis Chan “Forgotten God”
So the first effect of Christianity is to make people stop and think. They are not simply overawed by some great occasion. They say, “No, I must face this. I must think.” … the greatest trouble is that men and women go through life without thinking. Or they think for a moment but find it painful, so they stop and turn to a bottle of whiskey or television or something else—anything to forget.
— Martyn Lloyd-Jones
The truth is, you can become so familiar with Jesus that you don’t even know who he is. You can grow up in church, be around Bible teaching, go to camp, go to Christian school, have Christian family, friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors. … Why? Because you’re like, “I know Jesus. I know the stories. I know the doctrine. I got it all nailed down, you know …” And the truth is, you don’t. You don’t know him at all. You’re like the people in Nazareth. They’ve become so familiar of him that they’re really not aware of his true identity as God among them.
In more fundamental tribes, the Holy Spirit has two primary ministries: to write the Bible and convict us of sin. Basically, you are a nail, the Bible is a hammer, and the Holy Spirit’s job is to pound you.
— Mark Driscoll
Why doesn’t my rod work outside the temple?
I had the f***ing BR!
I was too busy beating face!
There should be a rule …[that people can’t shoot at you unless you see them]
Are you watching a movie?
Wanna play some Brawl?” (to Drew, asleep, in bed, facing the wall, w/ lights out)
Well fine! … If you wanna be a BASTARD!
— Adam T. Philyaw
OK … I don’t want to be stuck inside that snowflake
…didn’t work so well.
Well, I got that blown up by every known productivity enhancer. [chuckles] … This commercial’s weird.
— Drew, while asleep
On the contingency of our faith
As you said, if you’d been raised a Buddhist, you’d probably be a Buddhist. And yet, you also believe that Christianity is really true. This seems to entail that, by sheer accident of birth, you were raised and culturally conditioned to believe the one true faith. Do you really believe this? Doesn’t it seem more likely that you just happen to subscribe to the religion into which you were born (as most people do) because of social pressure, emotional consolation, attachment to tradition, etc.?
— Sam Harris
An eternal truth has to enter human discourse at one time or another. It will become necessarily contingent as soon as it touches the human and becomes part of history. There is no other way. So faith’s contingency is neither an argument for or against it.
— Andrew Sullivan
The troublesome example of other religions: Don’t you think Mormons and Muslims have similar stories to tell about feeling consoled in the presence of death, hearing voices, etc.? Can’t both Mormons and Muslims use the same argument you have used about the cultural success of their faiths to vindicate their own truth claims? How is it that you reject their claims, and how is it that in rejecting them you don’t find your own religious beliefs coming under pressure?
Moderation v. fundamentalism
There appears to be no principled separation between religious moderation and religious fundamentalism other than a facility for (and an inclination to) doubt. But how much doubt is too much? Why not doubt the whole shebang, as I do? The pope seems to believe many things which you doubt. Do you have reason to believe that the pope is mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity, or do you just not like the social consequences of some of his beliefs? Can you justify the intermediate position you’ve taken with respect to Catholicism in terms of truth and falsity (rather than consolation and its lack)? And if you disagree that the truth of an idea can be neatly separated from its consolations, what does the phrase “wishful thinking” mean to you?
— Sam Harris
But I do believe in the empty tomb as much as I believe in the cramped manger. They go together—marks of an appearance in human history as mysterious as the divine must always be to human minds.
— Andrew Sullivan
Unsolicited Advice for My Three Sons, In No Particular Order
Begin conversations with people on airplanes when you hear “We have begun our descent.” If they prove to be fascinating, you will broaden your world; if they prove insufferable, it’s only 15 minutes.
Collect words the way other people collect stray cats, tropical birds, or Pokemon Cards. Words are pixels, they are units of thought; just as you can render more precise images with more pixels, you can communicate ideas more powerfully — and maybe even think more efficiently — with more words. This is why vocabulary is among the metrics most highly correlated with success. But don’t be pedantic — use big words sparingly, only when they are the perfect fit.
If you drink green tea without sugar 30 times, it will taste acrid and mouth-puckering the first 29 times, and on the 30th it will taste pretty good. This is true of everything … there is no activity or habit you can’t develop a taste for. So you may as well develop a taste for things (and people) that are good for you.
Habits are for lazy people. And you are lazy. We all are. Habits are shortcuts to getting a whole lot of things done without spending too much of your finite supply of willpower. So use em.
People don’t look bad in photos because they “aren’t photogenic”; they look bad in photos because they think they are better looking than they are. Don’t be one of these people. Embrace and own the degree to which you are funny looking. It gives you personality, and it will cause you to be pleasantly surprised by your reflection in the mirror now and then.
Use people’s names whenever possible. When you forget someone’s name, ask them again and blame your dad for passing on bad-memory-for-names genes. Names are a door handle to a person; that small little effort opens them up.
When it comes to hangovers, the problem isn’t mixing types of alcohol; its simply about how much you drink. That’s always been my hunch, and I just looked it up and it appears to be true. It’s extremely difficult to do accurate research with a sample size one (though I am still working on it :), and this results in a lot of inaccurate conventional wisdom.
Wear the same shirt every weekday. Find a shirt you like, and buy eight of them. It will simplify your morning, and communicates to the world that you are focused.
Wear funny shirts on the weekends. You know this about me, I like silly shirts. Shirts that express joy, and perhaps an element of self-parody. Seventies Givenchy. Mr. Bubble. The technicolored dream coat. Moods are contagious, and a mood can be sparked by a shirt. Humans, broadly speaking, take themselves far too seriously, and you, in your silly shirt, are an antidote.
Figure out what your strengths are and build on them, empowered with the knowledge that there is no such thing as a normal or even optimal brain type. I believe I have low level ADD — you may too. Attention deficit disorder is a misnomer — its a brain type that is inclined towards creativity, and selective deep focus, and I happen to love it. Neurodiversity is not an accident … there are a range of different brain types each of which confer advantages and disadvantages and contribute to society in complimentary ways.
If peanut butter could only be found in the placenta of a rare tropical bird, it would cost $1,000 per ounce. Sure, caviar tastes good, but so does peanut butter. People are irrationally attracted to that which is scarce, because scarce things function as status symbols. If you understand the elements of human behavior that are irrational and predictable, you are freed from them and can benefit from the insight.
Respect science. It’s not an ideology; it’s a system for limiting our crazy human inclinations towards bias and misperception, borne out of humility. Every time you get in a commercial airplane, you are betting your life on the scientific method. If a collection of science skeptics builds an airplane and offers you a ride, don’t get in.
When microwaving, hit 66 seconds, 99 seconds, or 2:22 rather than even numbers. Why? Because 60 seconds is no more likely to be an appropriate amount of time to heat a cup of tea than 55 or 66 seconds. They are all arbitrary time periods. And you save a couple seconds. More important than the time savings is the ability to think for yourself.
Mentors — even highly successful ones — are more accessible than you think they are. So seek them out. Identify the people who have climbed the mountains you want to climb before and cold call them. They are accessible because mentoring is a form of therapy; we can’t give advice to our younger selves (much to my dismay), so instead we give advice to younger people and it feels good.
Always give money to street musicians, even bad ones. (Well maybe not really bad ones.) The streets need more music.
When you are young, poverty = freedom; when you are older, if you have kids, money = freedom. It makes it possible to do things you used to take for granted like sleep, read the newspaper and see a little bit of the world. I am not saying money should drive your career decisions, quite the contrary, it’s not what matters in life. But it’s good to understand that your relationship to it will change.
Small negotiations are practice for big ones, so engage in small daily negotiations as a form of learning. Almost everything is negotiable … I had heard this but didn’t believe it was true until I met your Mom :). You have succeeded when the person with whom you are negotiating feels pleasantly surprised by their capacity for generosity. You win not when you get the best price, but when you do so while building a strong relationship.
When you are at Starbucks, ask for a small coffee in a medium cup. They will over-pour, and you will end up with just enough room for milk. And save 50 cents. This is a little hack; the world is full of them.
Always tell the truth. Not because it’s written on a stone tablet, but because it’s a better practice. I used to occasionally find myself bending the truth, but I decided to stop about twenty years ago for four reasons: humans have highly evolved abilities to detect dishonesty, even when they don’t understand how; sharing vulnerability and imperfection connects you to people; the truth is generally good for people even if it’s hard to say; and as it turns out, it’s less work— if you always tell the truth it’s easier to remember what you have said.
Lead with your weaknesses. Make fun of yourself. Not compulsively — this reads as insecurity — but in an honest, playful, friendly way. This makes people comfortable, creates trust, and counter-intuitively, it comes across as confidence.
Community, broadly defined to include all relationships with other people, is everything. It’s not 60% of happiness, it’s 99%. Everything you think is important — success, building things, writing novels, gaining status — is important only insofar as it nourishes your current and future possible relationships.
Failure — whether it’s a failed jump shot, a failed relationship, a bankrupt company, or a scoop of ice cream falling off the cone — is a data point. Aspire to love data the way a father loves his sometimes obstreperous three boys: because of, not in spite of, imperfections.
If at all possible, have kids. Children are extraordinary and infuriating, and among the most powerful human experiences available to us. Kids are a front row seat to the most extraordinary of spectacles: the unfurling of a human life. Mommy and I are so lucky to have you boys … we are grateful every day. Having your own kids is also a good way to rediscover humility when you think you’ve figured it all out. And humility opens us up to powerful new experiences and relationships. Don’t have them too soon, or too late, and don’t underestimate the challenge, but for gosh sake have em, if you can.
Unsolicited Advice for My Three Sons, Volume 2
Take photos not to document happiness but to share beauty. Doing so will cause you to see the world with greater appreciation.
Write. Not so much for the writing but because it will cause you to live more attentively.
Get grunt jobs. Work construction. Work as a bar back, a dish boy. Restock shelves in a retail store. It will motivate you, and build appreciation for the contributions everyone makes. And for the rest of your life, you will tip better.
Speak only if it improves upon the silence.” Your father has a lot of room for improvement in this department, but I appreciate this quote from Mahatma Gandhi, which requires appreciating both the beauty of silence, and the beauty of a sentence that falls together like Incan masonry.
Tell stories that make you look like a nincompoop. Like the time you were in a last-minute frenzy while moving and put a stick of butter wrapped in a paper towel in your briefcase, only to find it six months later (yes I did this). Embarrass yourself early and often. This lightens the mood, and frees everyone around you — and you — to be more candid and take more risks.
Enjoy the screaming of other people’s children. It could be worse, it could be your kid. Some day it may be.
Don’t confuse acting unimpressed by the world with sophistication. Don’t be the blasé, jaded kid who thinks he’s cool; be the breathless, excited curious kid. Boredom is a failure to appreciate your “one wild and precious life,” as the poet Mary Oliver put it.
Don’t compete, create. Competing means by definition that you are playing by someone else rules. You are operating within narrow confines. This can be useful for learning and training. There is a place for competition of course — it’s fun to win. But winning is inherently a narrow experience, whereas creating is expansive. And in an increasingly non-zero-sum world, the winners are increasingly the creators.
Start a company, and if it fails, start another. There has never been a time with more upside and less downside for entrepreneurs. And there are few experiences that are more exhilarating and rewarding. Don’t get me wrong — it’s hard. And it crowds out other deeply rewarding experiences. You don’t need to do it right away. It does not need to be in lieu of writing books or joining the circus or training as an astronaut — there is time enough to do all these things. But the joy of building something with a team of people that moves the world forward is a distinct pleasure that I hope you experience.
Here’s how to do it — develop expertise (let other people pay you to learn); read ravenously; develop your idea with peers you admire; exult about the earth-shaking potential of the opportunity in the presence of rich people until they give you money; and then go for it.
Combine things that others don’t combine. Bloody Mary mix is surprisingly good in an egg scramble in the morning. So is leftover Thai food. I know it sounds unlikely; try it. Experiment. Much has been written about how creativity is fundamentally about surprising combinations, and this applies not only to egg scrambles, but also to business models, guests at a dinner party and sequences of words. This will sometimes results in cacophony, and other times will spark creativity, joy and EBITDA.
Don’t chose a city based on the weather. Two things matter: how a place filters for people, and how it filters for opportunity. Move to the city that has the greatest concentration of the people you aspire to be, and the opportunities that most interest you. The city is your incubator.
When you rent (or buy) an apartment, live as close as possible to your favorite corner. Live in a shoebox if you have to. The real estate market undervalues micro locations, and it meaningfully impacts your daily experience. And optimal square footage is smaller than people think.
Carry your own luggage. And when you are done, tip yourself.
Imagine that you could no longer walk. Think how beautiful walking would seem to you then, all the subtleties of the movement, the weight transition from heel to arc to ball of your foot. Do you extend your leg fully in a light march? Do you bounce a little before the other heel lands? Think of all the ways you can express joy when you walk. And walk that way.
When you are playing a game with a friend and there is uncertainty about a call, give him or her the point. Your objective should be to improve your game and build a friendship; a slight scorekeeping handicap advances both objectives.
Expect nothing from your friends, and everything from friendship. Ask little of your friends, except in a rare pinch. This way you will be constantly surprised by their generosity and kindness. This is what makes friendship such a central pillar of a life well-lived — it’s a relationship with small obligations and enormous potential for growth and joy.
Avoid shampoo cycles of thought. If you follow the instruction on a bottle of shampoo — lather, rinse, repeat — you could be in the shower for days. Similarly, if you allow yourself to repeat the same cycles of thought — “my ears are too big and consequently no one likes me … if only I had smaller ears,” you will waste precious time. The cost of insecurity is not so much self-doubt, which is healthy in moderation, but wasted time. Accept yourself as you are, with all your beautiful imperfections, and focus your brain cycles where they count.
Befriend the cashier at the corner store. And the guy at the dry cleaner. Learn their names. Ask about their families. The more you do this, the more smiles you will see when you open doors.
Chase balls and Frisbees. Hike up mountains, and through cities. If you can exercise joyfully, it’s a double win. But whatever it takes, exercise daily, most critically for the positive impact it has on the performance of your brain. There is no better wonder drug (believe me, I have sampled them).
When you are running, count to 8 over and over again. I don’t know why this makes it easier, but for some reason it does. It may have something to do with narrowing your focus on small, achievable steps in a process.
Run to your meetings. Making your standard work shoes running shoes, or comfortable shoes of some kind, so you are ready for action. Yes, you will sometimes arrive a little sweaty, but you will also arrive sooner, with more energy and a better functioning brain.
When you have an extra five minutes, call someone you like, whom you haven’t seen in a while, just to ask how they are doing. I am talking about all the people who make you smile when you think of them. Put all these people on your “favorites” list on your phone even if they live somewhere else. It’s easy to lose touch with friends. But it’s also not that hard to continue to build on friendships. Five to ten minutes every few months will do it, if you make the time.
Think neither too little nor too much about how you present yourself to the world. Don’t obsess on it, that just comes across as insecure, but do recognize that your presentation is one way that people make inferences about your character. Are you friendly? Vain? Disciplined? Obsessed with the Giants? Do you have a sense of humor? Be intentional about what you communicate to the world, verbally and non-verbally.
When choosing your personal style, don’t be a multiple choice answer — a frat boy, or punk rocker, an Emo-Punk. Defy pigeonholing. Have a point of view.
If you find yourself excruciatingly bored at a dinner party, fumbling for an excuse to use the rest room a second time, pretend you’ve been entrusted with a critical mission to discover what’s interesting about the person seated next to you. The world’s fate hangs in the balance. There is always something. When you find people boring, reframe it as a failure of your curiosity and interlocution.
Think less of yourself. By which I mean both think less frequently about yourself, and less highly of yourself. Keep your ego trimmed like a suburban lawn. Ego is a barrier between you and others, and connecting with others is the whole kit and kaboodle.
Remember that confidence is that which feels no need to assert itself. When you hear people (classmates, presidential candidates) saying how great they are, that is bombast. Bluster. Borne of a conflict between a cockiness and fear. What you are hearing is the fear. Develop the quiet kind of confidence, which is the only kind.
People tend to measure the world using the yardstick that measures them most flatteringly. Athletic people value athleticism; skeptical people value skepticism; beautiful people value beauty; funny people value humor, and so on. Don’t be one of these people. Challenge yourself to value strengths you don’t have. You will open yourself up to appreciating a much broader range of people and phenomena.
Treat other people as if they are operating with positive intentions, without a blinding yourself to the possible alternatives. If you are right, you have avoided starting an escalating pattern of distrust. If you are wrong, treating them in a generous fashion will result in the best possible outcome nine times out of ten even, even if their motivations are nefarious.
When your hair turns gray, don’t dye it. Visual indications of aging are the sounds of the clock ticking. Listen to the ticking. And don’t fight wrinkles, they are souvenirs from years of smiling.
When you feel like sticking a fork in your palm because you are so ashamed and humiliated and furious at yourself for letting the world down, and letting yourself down, smile. This is a sign that you have high standards. This is a sign that you expect more from yourself. This is good. Bottle every ounce of that feeling and take a shot of it when you are feeling unmotivated.
If you feel yourself starting to cry, whether because the beauty of the world has suddenly sharpened to a point that is piercing, or because of the weight of a loss, whether your own or someone else’s, is squeezing you like an orange, inhabit that feeling and experience it fully. Even though you are just a boy, or maybe a man who feels, at times, like a boy. This may happen more often than you would like, if you have inherited my over-active lachrymal glands, but it’s a sign that you are fully sentient.
When your parents give you advice, nod and smile. If it doesn’t connect, think about how to improve on your Minecraft world, but indulge them. Simply allowing others to be heard, even when your mind is elsewhere, is an act of generosity. And who knows, they may eventually say something useful.
Guilt = feeling as if you owe God something, or have something to hide.
We were sealed by the Holy Spirit, like a protective seal on food, to keep out impurities. (Eph 4:30)
Much of the time, surrender is not losing control, but admitting you never had it.
Don’t think you’re doing God a favor by not talking about his wrath.
For a lot of people dealing w/ an issue in their life, Plan A is being “zapped” by God, Plan B is fellowshipping and getting involved at church.
God doesn’t want a part of your heart any more than a spouse wants someone who is always fantasizing about someone else.
If you don’t get why the Sabbath is a big commandment, then you don’t get the gospel.
The train analogy presents the Christian life as a simple linear journey, where we never go off track and there is exactly one correct path in any situation. It also presents Faith and Feelings as steel railroad cars, linked with steel hitches, and able to go wherever Fact leads.
If I were to presume to improve upon the train analogy, I would represent it instead as chain of 3 people, making their way through a wilderness.
Fact – Fact is a rugged trail guide; Fact has made this journey before, and knows the right direction with little help. He is extremely fit, built like an NFL linebacker, and can take the shortest path between two points with ease, no matter how treacherous.
Faith – Faith is a young woman; Faith has heard about the destination, and knows its general direction, but she has never been there herself. She is not helpless, and could possibly make the journey herself, but she is much better off with Fact’s guidance and protection.
Feelings – Feelings is a small child. Feelings isn’t even aware that there is a destination, and she needs to be looked after. If Feelings led the way, the three would wander aimlessly until nightfall, looking at flowers, rocks, and whatever else catches her fancy.
If Fact simply grabs hold of Faith, and Faith of Feelings, and the three charge off through the wilderness, they will probably head in the right direction. Fact has uncanny navigation skills, and can find his way in nearly any terrain. But if Fact doesn’t carefully consider the route and pacing that he takes, he will simply drag Faith with him, with little Feelings flying along behind. This will damage both Faith and Feelings – by the end of the journey, Feelings will be covered in scrapes and bruises from being pulled up and down steep hills and over rocks and branches, trying to keep up with Fact. If Feelings survives at all, she will be much the worse for wear. Faith also, will be bruised and hurt.
Instead, Fact should consider his route carefully. Instead of charging straight up any hill that is in their way, he should find a path that is suitable to Faith and Feelings. This doesn’t mean that Feelings leads the way, or that Fact stops providing guidance, merely that Fact is keenly aware of their limitations.