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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c14f456 | A]ny history that deals with the efforts of the populace to defend itself from the abuses of wealth and tyranny is people's history . . . A people's history should be not only an account of popular struggle against oppression but an expose of the -people's history that has prevailed among generations of mainstream historians. It should be a critical history about a people's , those who propagated an elitist ideology and a loathing of the .. | people-s-history peoples-history | Michael Parenti | |
| 06ad708 | It has long been presumed that the diversity of constitutional forms makes for an optimal result. In reality, it creates a system of impediments that makes popular reform nearly impossible. As with Polybius and Cicero, so with Aristotle, and so with the framers of the United States Constitution in 1787 . . .--all have been mindful of the leveling threats of democratic forces and the need for a constitutional "mix" that allows only limited .. | democracy | Michael Parenti | |
| b432d3f | Men are seldom struck by incongruities in their appearance any more than their own conduct. | inconsistency self-awareness | James Fenimore Cooper | |
| b0b9db9 | you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| b90b5fb | The new birth is the creation of spiritual life, not the imitation of life. | John Piper | ||
| a5c8421 | Aimless, unproductive Christians contradict the creative, purposeful, powerful, merciful God we love. -- John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life | Matt Perman | ||
| 90ec7e2 | The church is not called to be responsible for the way unbelievers run their lives. But we are called to be responsible, by the power of the Spirit and for the glory of Jesus, for the way believers live and the kind of relationships that are cultivated in the fellowship of the church. | John Piper | ||
| c99a4d1 | The Calvary road with Jesus is not a joyless road. It is a painful one, but it is a profoundly happy one. When we choose the fleeting pleasures of comfort and security over the sacrifices and sufferings of missions and evangelism and ministry and love, we choose against joy. | John Piper | ||
| c49050e | This is why it is often called sovereign grace: it raises the dead. The dead do not raise themselves. God does by his grace. And it is this "glorious grace" that will be praised for all eternity." | John Piper | ||
| 7318c08 | How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose . . . ! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light, yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honor, though not in the eyes of men who see all hono.. | John Piper | ||
| 20a4456 | The question isn't, Do you have a voice? The question is, Do you have a song? If you've turned from your sins and trusted in the finished work of Christ, if you're forgiven and reconciled to God, then you have a song. It's a song of the redeemed, of those who have been rescued from the righteous wrath of God through the cross of Jesus Christ and are now called his friends. Once we were not a people, but now we are the people of God, and our.. | John Piper | ||
| 3ef3996 | At the Lausanne missions gathering in 2010, John Piper made the statement that "we should care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering." He chose the word "care" quite carefully. He didn't want to say we should do something about all suffering, because we can't do something about everything. But we can care." | Kevin DeYoung | ||
| 04381df | Marriage is patterned after Christ's covenant relationship to his redeemed people, the church. And therefore, the highest meaning and the most ultimate purpose of marriage is to put the covenant relationship of Christ and his church on display. That is why marriage exists. If you are married, that is why you are married. If you hope to be, that should be your dream. | John Piper | ||
| 2e25250 | There is something that assaults God even more directly. It is the subtle sense that grows in us, usually unconsciously, that the real effectiveness of our spiritual acts is at the horizontal level among people, not before the face of God. In other words, if my children see me pray at meals, it will do them good. If the staff sees me fasting, they may be inspired to fast. If my roommate sees me read my Bible, he may be inspired to read his... | John Piper | ||
| 0607b59 | Life is too precious to squander on trivial things. Grant us, Lord, the unswerving resolve to pray and live with David Brainerd's urgency: "Oh, that I might never loiter on my heavenly journey!" | John Piper | ||
| aa27b9a | is often a good career move for an author. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 2ec461f | History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage t.. | John Keegan | ||
| 17da70c | W]e are hardened to what we know, and we rationalise and even justify cruelties practised by us and our like while retaining the capacity to be outraged, even disgusted by practices equally cruel which, under the hands of strangers, take a different form. | punishment war warfare | John Keegan | |
| 9a21886 | Rundstedt, revered throughout the German regular officer corps as its last archetypal Prussian, refused to deal with detail or to look at small-scale maps, as if the fighting itself were distasteful to him, but spent his days reading detective stories and thrice resigned his command. | John Keegan | ||
| 7c690eb | A. Scott Berg's more recent Wilson; John Keegan's wrenching The First World War; Martin Gilbert's The First World War; Gerhard Ritter's The Schlieffen Plan; Lowell Thomas's 1928 book about World War I U-boats and their crews, Raiders of the Deep; Reinhard Scheer's Germany's High Sea Fleet in the World War; Churchill's The World Crisis, 1911-1918; Paul Kennedy's The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914; and R. H. Gibson and Maurice Prend.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 0718d81 | There cannot be any hard and fast rules. But there can be suggestions and useful analogies. The most useful, to my mind, is that of the difference between the English and French judicial systems. In England (and America), the task of the court in criminal cases, which it devolves upon a jury, is to arrive at a verdict of 'guilty' or 'not guilty' on the evidence presented by prosecuting and defending counsel in turns. Trials are conflicts an.. | John Keegan | ||
| ee33fbf | The mere contemplation of revelation and the loss of its possibility, though, had shown him something important. Stephan von Namtzen both attracted and aroused him, but it was not because of his own undoubted physical qualities. It was, rather, the degree to which those qualities reminded Grey of James Fraser. Von Namtzen was nearly the same height as Fraser, a powerful man with broad shoulders, long legs, and an instantly commanding presen.. | Diana Gabaldon | ||
| 5050314 | God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham--and everyone else--thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel's story would come to focus on its God, the real one. | Peter Enns | ||
| 46512ee | A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story--in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them. | Peter Enns | ||
| 96ee2fa | If there is any cure for thinking of the Bible as a once-told-forever-binding source of information about God and his people, Paul is it. For | Peter Enns | ||
| 9551d3f | My commitment to follow through on my choice came with a cost. I tried very hard, for years, with complete transparency, to blend together old and new--the particular Christian tradition that birthed me and for which I had deep respect, and the bigger Bible I had come to know, was excited about, and could not deny without deceiving myself and others. | Peter Enns | ||
| 44b9054 | A noncontextual reading of Scripture is not only methodologically arbitrary but also theologically problematic. It fails to grasp in its entirety a foundational principle of theology that informs not only our understanding of the Bible but of all of God's dealing with humanity recorded there, particularly in Jesus himself: God condescends to where people are, speaks their language, and employs their ways of thinking. Without God's condescen.. | Peter Enns | ||
| abcad02 | Paul would agree, to a certain extent. He did not think that Jesus was the founder of a new religion, rather the concluding, surprise chapter to Israel's story. | Peter Enns | ||
| d32c8c6 | Christ is the ultimate example of how God enters the messiness of history to save his people. | Peter Enns | ||
| d92c024 | Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth. | christianity enlightenment rational reason sin total-depravity truth | James K.A. Smith | |
| 6a9139c | analysis of the story will sometimes undercut our antepredicative grasp of it). | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 257228d | what does it look like to bear witness in a secular age? What does it look like to be faithful? To what extent have Christians unwittingly absorbed the tendencies of this world? On the one hand, this raises the question of how to reach exclusive humanists. On the other hand, the question bounces back on the church: To what extent do we "believe" like exclusive humanists?" | James K.A. Smith | ||
| d269d1a | even the secularist is pressed by a sense of something more -- some "fullness" that wells up within (or presses down upon) the managed immanent frame we've constructed in modernity." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| f7bde4e | Acknowledging the interpreted status of the gospel should translate into a certain humility in our public theology. It should not, however, translate into skepticism about the truth of the Christian confession. If the interpretive status of the gospel rattles our confidence in its truth, this indicates that we remain haunted by the modern desire for objective certainty. But our confidence rests not on objectivity but rather on the convictio.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| c92df9e | But should we accept this negative view of power? Is power all bad? Specifically, can Christians share in this devaluation of power and discipline as inherently evil? Can we who claim to be disciples - who are called and predestined to be conformed to the likeness of the Son (Rom. 8:29) - be opposed to discipline and formation as such? Can we who are called to be subject to the Lord of life really agree with the liberal Enlightenment notion.. | church discipline god jesus power spiritual-discipline spiritual-formation | James K.A. Smith | |
| 0829ce3 | While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically these disciplines and practices are aimed at very different ends. And here we must make an important distinction: we can distinguish good discipline from bad discipline by its telos, its goal or end. So the difference between the disciplines that form us into disci.. | spiritual-discipline spiritual-formation | James K.A. Smith | |
| 254b819 | Our essential embodiment will keep interrupting our Platonic desire to do away with the body, will keep insinuating itself into our dualistic discourses to remind us that the triune God of creation traffics in ashes and dust, blood and bodies, fish and bread. And he pronounces all of it "very good" | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 08eaefd | Formative Christian worship paints a picture of the beauty of the Lord--and a vision of the he desires for creation--in a way that captures our imagination....The biblical vision of --of a world where the Lamb is our light, where swords are beaten into ploughshares, where abundance is enjoyed by all, where people from every tribe and tongue and nation sing the same song of praise, where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness li.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| c048de3 | The state does not take a merely temporal regulatory role and leave salvation in the hands of the church; rather, the modern state seeks to replace the church by itself becoming a soteriological institution.16 It is in this sense, then, that the modern state is a parody of the church: "The body of the state is a simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ" (RONT, 182). As a result, while political rhetoric may suggest that the state is .. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 8125361 | But one of the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation, Taylor argues, was a disenchantment of the world. Critical of the ways such an enchanted, sacramental understanding of the world had lapsed into sheer superstition, the later Reformers emphasized the simple hearing of the Word, the message of the gospel, and the arid simplicity of Christian worship. The result was a process of excarnation--of disembodying the Christian fa.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 6566866 | We aren't really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts | James K.A. Smith | ||
| d71623f | Not surprisingly, where Barnes really appreciates the haunting of immanence is in the realm of the aesthetic. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 7747efd | You might have Bible verses on the wall in every room of the house and yet the unspoken rituals reinforce self-centeredness rather than sacrifice. Thus | James K.A. Smith | ||
| d0caa99 | Those evangelicals who have been raised and shaped by forms of Christianity that are roughly "fundamentalist" will either: a. become taken with the modern moral order and thus sort of replay the excarnational development of modernity, just now a few centuries later, sort of catching up with the wider culture; so under the guise of the "emerging church" or "progressive" evangelicalism, we'll be set on a path to something like Protestant libe.. | James K.A. Smith |