Theology That Bites Back
“What these people have in common is that they are all engaged in a hedonistic pursuit of sensual pleasure. They all want to get laid and loaded. The name of the game is sensory overload. Now if I were looking for a place to shelve ‘stoned out of his gourd,” would I be more likely to put it after joy and before peace, or after excess of wine and before revelling?”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 20
“The man is not doing his best . . . he writes his sermons on Saturday nights. That last I could the crowning disgrace of a man’s ministry. It is dishonest. It is giving but the last flicker of the week as it sinks in its socket, to those who, simply to talk about it as a bargain, have paid for the full light burning at its brightest. And yet men boast of it. They tell you in how short time they write their sermons, and when you hear them preach you only wonder that it took so long”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, pp. 84-85
“Sins are like grapes, they come in bunches . . . Sins tend to cluster, and when you go down into the middle of that crowd, you are more likely to find a pot dealer there than, say, if you were at a quilting bee.”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 20
“When someone says that Paul prohibited ‘drunkenness’ but not ‘getting high,’ we have an example of this kind of catching at words. Paul also says not to get drunk with wine. Does that mean gin is all right? Beer? Rubbing alcohol?”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 17
“Fasten yourself to the center of your ministry; not to some point on the circumference. The circumference must move when the center moves”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 82
“Maybe this is simply a generational divide. One generation likes a dry martini after work, and a new generation prefers a smoky kick. Couldn’t it just be a matter of generational taste? One prefers a smoky kick with actual smoke, while the other wants the smoky kick of Laphroaig, which, as the ad copy once put it, ‘ tastes like a burning hospital’”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 10
“The bringing of truth, of Christ the Truth, to man, of the whole Christ to the whole man, you can think of no work larger in its idea than that.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 80
“The worshipers of Mammon have known for a long time that there is big money to be made from large numbers of people who have acquired a bad habit. There’s gold in them thar potheads”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 3
“The great procession of the year, sacred to our best human instincts with the accumulated reverence of ages—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday—leads those who walk in it, at least once every year, past all the great Christian facts, and, however careless and selfish be the preacher, will not leave it in his power to keep them from his people”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 79
“The toxicity of a Woodstock joint was relatively low—a modest amount of THC. Today the levels can get a lot higher, just like the user. And there are a number of people who are now using extracts that are almost entirely pure THC. Whatever kick that mule had back in the seventies, it is about four to six times greater than that now. This is kind of like the difference between a Bud Light and a shot of Old Gym Sock Corn Whiskey”
Devoured by Cannabis, p. 2
