“Optimism is not a virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don’t want to see. Hope is only hope when it is hope with eyes wide open to all that challenges hope.” Richard John Neuhaus, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile… [Read more…]
December 17, 2010
“. . . in the Gospel and in faith the divine will is revealed and realized. This is the reason why the religious conception of the Gospel and of faith is with the Reformers most intimately connected with their belief in predestination. We in our time no longer understand this. We have lost the habit… [Read more…]
September 30, 2010
“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years .” Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (New York: Barnes & Noble… [Read more…]
July 24, 2010
“Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition… [Read more…]
June 22, 2010
“The men pulled the heavy, brass-handled sword-bayonets from their scabbards and clicked them over their guns’ blackened muzzles. Most of the Legion had never believed they would use the bayonets in an infantry charge, instead, when the war was over and the Yankees had been sent back north, they had though they would take the… [Read more…]
November 27, 2009
“Lord, there are no streams but thine, Can assuage a thirst like mine! ’Tis a thirst thyself didst give, Let me therefore drink and live.” John Newton, Olney Hymns, Book 3 (Hymn 94).
September 6, 2011
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