“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 most important, and is central, and …
Everything Matters
“Everything is connected. Everything matters. Nonsense tolerated anywhere will metastasize, and the results are always ugly” (Writers to Read, p. 25).
Earthy or Worldly?
“We affirm a fundamental creational loyalty to the world and constantly thwart the world’s desire to become disloyal to itself. This is why it is good to be earthy and bad to be worldly. Worldliness is just a clever way of deserting the world. This is the explanation of why worldliness is so consistently weary …
Ordinary Loyalty
“Modern man, progressive man, has an insatiable lust to interfere with the ordinary things. He strives to become superman and only succeeds in erasing ordinary men” (Writers to Read, p. 24).
Inverted Reputation
“Athanasius had to stand contra mundum, and it is he who is the representative man from that era and not the whole world he had to contend against” (Writers to Read, p. 21).
Love Has Fists
“Loving something while being unwilling to fight for it would be better categorized as lust” (Writers to Read, p. 20).
More Than Just Eyes
“The problem is not with the word worldview. The problem is with what we naturally tend to think of as our eyes. Of course, blindness is not a worldview, and it is an improvement if we move from that blindness to coherent thoughts that we think. A brainview is better than blindness. But the real …
All of It Everywhere
“When Chesterton writes about anything, each thought is like a living cell, containing all the DNA that could, if called upon, reproduce the rest of the body. Everything is somehow contained in anything. This is why you can be reading Chesterton on Dickens and learn something crucial about marriage, or streetlights, or something else” (Writers …
An Easy Mistake to Make
“Future readers, a century or two out, might make the mistake of calling the twentieth century a truly Christian literary age, because the only writers from that age still being read are overwhelmingly Christian. ‘Ah,’ they will say—‘a golden age of the Christian faith, when giants walked the earth. Not like today . . .’ …
The Work of Celestial Bees
“Watching covenantal righteousness and mercy come to your children’s children is not an abstraction, a dry datum out of your catechism or doctrine class. This is one of God’s great promises, and it tastes just like the honey made by celestial bees allowed to forage in heaven’s clover” (Rules, p. 279).