Category: Books and Culture

“The therapeutic heresy has insisted on complete emotional autonomy and independence, and this has resulted in absolutely incoherent phrases like ‘my truth.’ But the fact that it is incoherent doesn’t keep you from hearing it all the time . . . In the government school system, teachers have to accommodate furries. How did this kind of nonsense get this far? Because of untethered empathy. Because we live in a generation that wants to disconnect from the way the world actually is.”

Keep Your Kids, p. 34

“Never forget that the devil at heart is a prohibitionist.”

Mere Christendom, p. 39

“But not knowing Him does not just result in Hell later. It also means that when we refuse to acknowledge Him here and now, the end result is that we start building little prototypes of Hell in order to test drive them. And that is why the public square rapidly becomes a haunt for owls and jackals.”

Mere Christendom, p. 38

“They haul you away to their reeducation centers more in pity than in anger.”

Mere Christendom, p. 37

“Sudden apostasies only seem sudden. How do you go bankrupt? First gradually, and then suddenly. That last bit is what everybody notices, but it was a long time coming.”

Keep Your Kids, p. 34

“For the sake of additional clarity, let’s call this toxic form of empathy ‘untethered empathy.’ But that immediately raises a question. This pathos, this feeling: what is it untethered from? It is untethered from God, from His Word, from His people, and from His world. A person’s feelings are disconnected from absolutely everything else—and your feelings are disconnected from everything but their feelings. This is the logic of the outer darkness.”

Keep Your Kids, p. 32

“Being a creature, I reason from axioms and decline the invitation to prove my axioms.”

Mere Christendom, p. 33

“With sympathy, there is an objective solution outside of and independent from anyone’s feelings. It’s objectively true. But with empathy, feelings are the only reality that may be considered to taken into account. With empathy, feelings are the only game in town—and if you’re not empathizing, then you are judgmental and hateful.”

Keep Your Kids, pp. 31-32