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“For the past twenty-five years, culture has been obsessed with making males and females more alike, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s even enlightened. But what I’ve noticed — at least among young people — is that this convergence has mostly just prompted females to adopt the worst qualities of men. It’s like girls are trying to attain equality by becoming equally shallow and selfish.”
Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (New York: Scribner, 2004), 178.
“England is an island encompassed by two oceans, an ocean of water, and an ocean of wickedness. O that it might be encompassed with a third ocean, that of repenting tears!”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 65.
“He also told the story of some Massachusetts commissioners who invited the Indians to send a dozen of their youth to study free at Harvard. The Indians replied that they had sent some of their young braves to study there years earlier, but on their return ‘they were absolutely good for nothing, being neither acquainted with the true methods for killing deer, catching beaver, or surprising an enemy.’ They offered instead to educate a dozen or so white children in the ways of the Indians ‘and make men of them.’”
Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 153; citing Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753.
“Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.”
Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge.
“God’s kingdom is happening right under your noses . . .”
N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (Harper One: New York, 2006), 103.
“Human society can advance only to a certain point before it becomes corrupted, and begins to die.”
Samuel Stanhope Smith, Presbyterian minister and seventh president of the College of New Jersey (i.e. Princeton) from 1795 to 1812; cited in Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006), 21, n. 31.
“Disinterestedness was the most common term the founders used as a synonym for the classical conception of virtue or self-sacrifice; it better conveyed the threats from interests that virtue seemed increasingly to face in the rapidly commercializing eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson had defined disinterested as being ’superior to regard of private advantage; not influenced by private profit,’ and that was what the founders meant by the term. We today have lost most of this earlier meaning. Even educated people now use disinterested as a synonym for uninterested, meaning ‘indifferent or unconcerned.’ It is almost as if we cannot quite imagine someone who is capable of rising above a pecuniary interest and being unselfish or impartial where an interest might be present.”
Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006), 16.
“This Hopeful also told Christian, that there were many more of the men in the fair that would take their time and follow after.”
Even in the city of Vanity, there are many who would respond to the Gospel; John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, chapter 14.
“. . . the mood of the Western world from roughly the 1780s through to the 1980s was very different. We will pipe you (said the prevailing philosophy) the water you need; we will arrange for ‘religion’ to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe – harmless, in fact – with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever. Those who want it can have enough to keep them going. Those who don’t want their life, and their way of life, disrupted by anything ‘religious’ can enjoy driving along concrete roads, visiting concrete-based shopping malls, living in concrete-floored houses. Live as if the rumor of God never existed!”
N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (Harper One: New York, 2006), 18-19.
“But when you are come to that town [Vanity] and shall find fulfilled what I have here related, then remember your friend [Evangelist], and quit yourselves like men; and ‘commit the keeping of your souls to God, as unto a faithful Creator.’”
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, chapter 13.
