Glory Days

“The popular expressions of American exceptionalism are as old as dirt. There is nothing new about top dogs vaunting themselves over their top dogginess. This is the most unexceptional form of exceptionalism possible. This high school has been here for many decades, and nobody currently knows who the senior class president was twenty-five years ago. Nobody knows because nobody cares.”

American Milk & Honey, p. 160

No Thanks to Both

“To leave true spiritual blessings out of the equation is to place human beings on the level of swine in a sty—with blessings being understood as anything edible that can fit in the mouth, like mash or acorns. But the gnostic error, the opposite error, is just as filled with unbelief—ungratefully reducing human beings to the level of wraiths, ghosts, and spiritual wisps. It is not the case that God gave material blessings to the Jews in the Old Testament, while in the New Covenant, all the blessings have been transported beyond the stars, or somehow vaporized. On this view, God has apparently appointed a team of burly archangels to throw all of our material blessings into a Cosmic Nebulizer, which will turn every last one of them into a very fine spiritual mist, in order to make Heaven idolatry-proof.”

American Milk & Honey, pp. 150-151

The Soil in Which Antisemitism Grows

“But just because we have left material blessings out of our thinking, they do not therefore disappear from the world. Somebody is always going to be better off. And when that happens, our evaluation of it will either be governed by the laws of gratitude, which are biblical, or by the laws of envy, which are demonic. Because Christians have not studied how covenant prosperity works, they have opened the door to all manner of biting, striving, scratching, and carping, and have thus unwittingly created an opportunity for antisemitism to arise.”

American Milk and Honey, p. 148