“For about three centuries, we have been taught (by the devil, or someone very much like him) that grime is more ‘authentic’ than being clean, being disheveled is more real than being put together, and so on. Like most lies of this nature, the destructive impact of it falls most heavily on women . . …
Retail Detritus
“Three miles down that stretch of freeway, he downshifted and pulled off the highway on the next exit ramp he came to, turned right at the light, and headed off down a strip occupoed by mobile-home dealers, tattoo parlors, and numerous stores full of retail detritus” (Evangellyfish, p. 150).
A True Gift
“One of the best ways for a man to love a woman is to love her children” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 82).
In a Wholesome Kind of Way
“At this she bobbed her head perkily like a ponytailed girl in a biscuit commercial from 1957” (Evangellyfish, p. 148).
Math Is Harder Than That
“Buying a truckload of stuff is not necessarily ‘saving money’ because it was all 20 percent off” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 81).
Kind of a Pushover
“If Bill had been a local potentate centuries before, and his city was under siege, and he had been told by the randy and imperious besieger to ‘Surrender all your gold, and let us ravish all your women,’ Bill would have appeared above the city gates to say something along the lines of ‘Okay!'” (Evangellyfish, …
Liberty in Dying
“Once a man has come to Jesus in order to be put to death, he may then (after the fact) do as he pleases. But unless he has died, nothing he does (however technically correct) will be right” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 80).
Other Meetings Can Be Like That Too
“His moral authority was apparently stuck, like an oil-soaked T-shirt down in the sump pump, and this made it hard to control the flooding in this elder-meeting basement of his” (Evangellyfish, p. 145).
Mature Authority
“The problem is not that right-handed, straight-line authority is evil — it is most necessary for Congress, judges, soldiers, policemen, and parents teaching toddlers. But it is not the most mature expression of authority, and to believe that it is the only kind of authority for both mature and immature means that one is a …
A Country Song or Two
“His many late hours spent in acquiring this valuable profit-and-loss expertise were a large part of the reason that his wife Mary was currently spending assorted hours in the arms of another man. A country song or two has been written about this kind of thing, and the Arkansas poet who wrote them knows whereof …