“For we are not just doing battle with the powers of darkness; we are also engaged in mortal conflict with the theology of Madeline Bassett, resident theologian and high priestess of pop evangelicalism” (Writers to Read, p. 57). … [Read more...]

“The besetting sin of many cranky, conservative Christian types is their inability to make any good point whatever without sounding shrill. And the better the point, the shriller the making of it can be” (Writers to Read, p. 55). … [Read more...]

“There is a logical bedrock upon which the entire cosmos is built. We do not live in a house built on sand. Metaphor works for a reason. The walls in this house are straight for a reason. The corners go together and fit for a reason” (Writers to Read, p. 53). … [Read more...]

“When we move from word to referent, we think we are leaping from crag to crag, across and abyss below. If we slip, we have had it. But this description is itself dependent upon a metaphor, as though meaning has to get increasingly smudgy every time we make a xerox copy of it. … [Read more...]

“Wodehouse was merciless to pretentiousness, and aspiring writers are the most pretentious fellows on the planet. So there’s that spiritual benefit” (Writers to Read, p. 50). … [Read more...]

“True, there is an occasional stray hell or damn, and this is unfortunate, because many modern Christians do all their worldview analysis through the simple process of counting them” (Writers to Read, p. 48). … [Read more...]

“First-rate writers are more interested in what they are writing about than in the fact that they are writing about it. That is why they are interesting” (Writers to Read, p. 39). … [Read more...]

“Those who want to be creative originals from scratch seldom are, and those who slavishly follow the recipe have a different problem, just as debilitating. Those who look carefully at the masters to learn and imitate soon find their own distinctive voice with their own … [Read more...]

“The critic need not be secure in order to successfully market his wares. He just has to be less insecure than the artists he is criticizing, which, given the temperament of most cape and beret artists post-Rousseau, is not that hard” (Writers to Read, p. 37). … [Read more...]

“What is the authority of the critic, exactly? Where does it come from? A certain measure of it has to be the capacity to generate fear, which is probably why successful critics generally know how to slash as they write” (Writers to Read, p. 33). … [Read more...]

“Serious thought takes the world as it actually is. This is quite different from taking it as ‘serious’ thinkers do, locked up as they are in the back recesses of their brainy parts” (Writers to Read, p. 28). … [Read more...]

“The Christian faith is permanently sane and is therefore always a bit out of fashion. Fads and fashions are mild insanities, Chesterton taught, and that is why the church always seems behind the times. It is actually beyond the times” (Writers to Read, p. 27). … [Read more...]

“You give the last piece of pie to God, who doesn’t eat pie, by giving it to your neighbor, who does” (Writers to Read, p. 26). … [Read more...]

“But remember, the fruit—which Christ required for identifying the nature of a tree—is way out on the edges of the tree and is at the farthest point away from the root. We must recover the understanding that peripherals are central because the center is important. The root is the … [Read more...]

“Everything is connected. Everything matters. Nonsense tolerated anywhere will metastasize, and the results are always ugly” (Writers to Read, p. 25). … [Read more...]