Theology That Bites Back
“Larry jumped to his feet to follow her, and Eve noticed how quick and cat-like he was. Big cat. But when he disappeared from her line of sight, she cocked an ear for a moment. There was no indication, faint or loud, of anything like fee fi fo fum”
Ecochondriacs, pp. 59-60
“I think that it would give to our preaching just the quality which it appears to me to most lack now. That quality is breadth. I do not mean liberality of thought, nor tolerance of opinion, nor anything of that kind. I mean largeness of movement, the great utterance of great truths, the great enforcement of great duties, as distinct from the minute, and subtle, and ingenious treatment of little topics, side issues of the soul’s life, bits of anatomy, the bric-a-brac of theology”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 32
“‘Oh, deadly serious. No God, above us, only sky. It seems that boinking nubile young dopes would be just the ticket. If morality is just a social construct, one has to admire that kind of clear-headed behavior. And in a Christian school, too.’ Marcie just stared. Jill looked back at her with her very best fat face. And, as fat faces go, it was a pretty good one”
Ecochondriacs, p. 59
“Of the three women, the one who was out in front and apparently the spokesman for them all could have been attractive if she had wanted to be, or she used to be attractive, or something of that nature. The other two were in a different category entirely. They looked like nothing on earth”
Ecochondriacs, p. 57
“The age has no aversion to preaching as such. It may not listen to your preaching. If that proves to be the case, look for the fault first in your preaching, and not in the age.”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 30
“And at just that moment, there was a clatter and a rustle and pother of self-importance at the door of the office, and three women, of the protesting variety, came in.”
Ecochondriacs, p. 57
“That left him with nothing but guilt, and the unpleasant sensation of being the moral equivalent of a three-inch green tree frog”
Ecochondriacs, p. 48
“Preaching is the bringing of truth through personality . . . it must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It must come genuinely through him”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, pp. 26-27
“One time they had given him a little monologue, which he had delivered straight to camera, which argued that if you divided the name Adam into two words, a dam, you could see how easy it was for our humanity to become a blockage to the divine energy. If you wanted the energy to flow, you really needed to blow up that dam. It had occurred to Montenegro while he was delivering this particular message that this also had the added blessing of freeing up all the spiritual salmon, but he didn’t say anything about that”
Ecochondriacs, pp. 44-45
“‘Divorce?’ He had no right to be amazed at the prospect of divorce appearing suddenly like this, but it is often the case that delusional people experience feelings that they have no right to experience”
Ecochondriacs, p. 42
