Secret Of The Easy Yoke
by Pedro The Lion

I could hear the church bells ringing
they pealed aloud your praise
the member's faces were smiling
with their hands outstretched to shake
it's true they did not move me
my heart was hard and tired
their perfect fire annoyed me
I could not find you anywhere

Could someone please tell me the story
of sinners ransomed from the fall?
I still have never seen you
and some days I don't love you at all

The devoted were wearing bracelets
to remind them why they came
some concrete motivation
when the abstract could not do the same
But if all that's left is duty, I'm falling on my sword
at least then, I would not serve an unseen distant lord

Could someone please tell me the story
of sinners ransomed from the fall?
I still have never seen you
and some days I don't love you at all

If this only a test
I hope that I'm passing, cause I'm losing steam
But I still want to trust you

peace be still
peace be still
peace be still

"Christians and libertarians can unite on difficult issues"

-Marvin Olasky
This is a snapshot from my facebook profile. According to World Magazine, one of them is a lie.

"As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

-George Orwell

-Bonus article on active and passive voice

"Years of hardship had taught Jonson to seek his feasts
in his imagination..."

-Intro to Ben Jonson

"What you think about God - not what you say you think about God, but what you really think deep down inside - is the most important determination of your character." (24)

-Dr. John Walton

Lies Printed on My Waffle Iron
by Annie Mackey

Magic

Easy Clean

Literary tragedy, so often praised for "telling it like it is," does not portray catastrophe as we experience it in real life. It omits, in the words of C.S. Lewis, "the clumsy and apparently meaningless bludgeoning of much of real misfortune and the prosaic littleness which usually rob real sorrows of their dignity" and present instead suffering "that is always significant and sublime."

-Leland Ryken

"Most people want to wake up in the morning with a general at the foot of their bed saying 'Go do this.' The problem is there's somebody at the foot of their bed saying, 'Once upon a time…' "

- N.T. Wright

-here

"I simply cannot take it anymore. I have to be president again.
I have to."

“If I ever become a saint, I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ ”

-Mother Teresea

that's why my paper was shorter than you assigned

"The more words, the more vanity, and what is the advantage to man?"

-Solomon

In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminally ill patients. That is, after all, the case... What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

"This same tension exists in the church as anywhere: we’ve come to love our bonds because we are granted a measure of success by keeping them. The church, I think, is willing to sacrifice basic human and civil liberties for good and noble results. We prefer success or even just stability to freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is messy and unmanageable."

-NakedPastor comparing Putin and the church

We must blend into the choir, sing as static with the whole,
We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul,
And in this endless race for property and privilege to be won
We must run, we must run, we must run.

"Walton just disintegrated 18 years of sermons that I've listened to - in the course of one class session today."
-Yee Sum

"he attacked democracy as an absurd social ideal... as though truth could be discovered by totting up votes."
-Wikipedia, on Thomas Carlyle


“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.”
-Stephen Vincent Benet

I am 77 years old and I have never seen this country in such a bad state. It is madness. What we are seeing is the fall of the Roman Empire, only now it is the fall of America, the glory of our Empire. This war is what Parthia was to Rome….

Democracy, whether in Sweden or the United States, depends on the voter’s capacity to think. If you have read the best of what has been thought and said, then your cognition and understanding is on a much higher level than if you have read Harry Potter or Stephen King. So what this decline into half-literature and mediocre media really means is de facto a self-destruction of democracy.

-Harold Bloom

-PostSecret

“Poetry is what is lost in translation.”
-Robert Frost

“The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.”
-Thomas Carlyle

“Write the truth.”

“religion has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy.”

-Robert McKee

"Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it...

we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and he cannot die except by being a man."

-The Quotable C.S. Lewis on Atonement

I do not doubt God or his ability to express revelation exactly as he wants it to be. The thought that God cannot reveal truth unless it is in a book that is supernaturally prevented from having normal, imperfect, human expressions of its time really never occurs to me. I assume that within the expressions, thought world, worldviews and literary genres of the time, God got exactly what he wanted and I can preach it without having to be concerned about "errancy."
-Internet Monk

“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”
-E.M. Forster, Novelist

"Our hope is that people gathering around the fiction and essays included in this resource will take the occasion to listen for God in new places. There is no telling, of course, where one may hear the Word spoken; it has been said that even the stones will cry out..."
-Peter Hawkins, "Introduction" to Listening for God, vol. 1

"the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade."

-How America Lost the War on Drugs

58%-Gen-Next:The Least Republican Generation

Saint Simeon Stylites

“The script of the book is a host and launching pad
for the wind among us that the world cannot evoke
and the church cannot resist”

-Walter Brueggemann
on the inspiration of Scripture

-Matt Stuart

"OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don't love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet."

-here

"The storyteller's selection and arrangement of events is his metaphor for the interconnectedness of all the levels of reality -- personal, political, environmental, spiritual. Stripped of its surface of characterization and location, story structure reveals his personal cosmology, his insight into the deepest patterns and motivations for how and why things happen in this world -- his map of life’s hidden order."

“The final cause of the decline of story runs very deep. Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of our art. The writer shapes story around a perception of what’s worth living for and what’s worth dying for, what is foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth -- the essential values. In decades past, writer and society more or less agreed on these questions, but more and more ours has become an age of moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism -– a great confusion of values. As the family disintegrates and sexual antagonisms rise, who, for example, feels he understands the nature of love? And how, if you do have a conviction, do you express it to an ever-more skeptical audience? This erosion of values has brought with it a corresponding erosion of story. Unlike writers in the past, we can assume nothing.”

“Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.”

-Robert Mckee, Story
Quoted by Donald Miller, Nov. 11

"Religious Americans are not only much more likely to give money and volunteer their time to religious and secular institutions, they are also more likely to provide aid to family members, return incorrect change, help a homeless person, and donate blood."

-Scandal of the Secular Conscience?

"Having a pint of beer after a game of football or going to the gym could be the key to a long, healthy life, new research claims. According to the study, moderate drinking combined with exercise is the best combination to prevent life-threatening conditions - even better than total abstention."

-The Telegraph

“God is not simply code language for what is happening anyway.” (30)

“Every center of power fears poets, because poets never fight fair.” (41)

-Walter Brueggeman

1. Pagan religions have supernatural origins.
2. Pagan religions teach some truth about God.
3. Pagan religions are used by God to advance his own plan of redemption.

-Jesus Creed, quote from God's Rivals

“Theology is meant to be temporary
Theology must be at its essence, confessional. It is not enough to simply say what is (or really how we see it to be); theology must come from the life of the one who holds it. We may well have a dead theology, not because the ideas are dead, but because the people who passionately held them and the reasons for their conception have passed. Because theology is connected to real life, answering particular questions, concerns, and opportunities of the day, it will be ever-changing. If it is not so, then it may well not be theology – it may be dogma, history, or a collection of random facts, but not theology. Theology is the living understanding of the story of God in play with the story of our lives.” (121)

-Doug Pagitt, Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches

Response by Mark Driscoll
“Perhaps most concerning are Pagitt’s declarations that “what we believe is not ‘timeless,’ ” theology will be “ever-changing,” and that “complex understandings meant for all people, in all places, for all times are simply not possible.” I am left to wonder if his pleading for love is something he also believes should be “ever-changing,” an that some future evolution of Christianity could embrace violent injustice yet remain faithful?

In conclusion, Christians are to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3 NIV). Therefore, the truths of Christianity are constant. But the methods by which truth is articulated and practiced must be culturally appropriated and therefore constantly changing (1 Corinthians 9:22-23). If both doctrine and practice are constant, the result is dead orthodoxy, which Pagitt is reacting against. If both doctrine and practice are constantly changing, the result is living heresy, which Pagitt is contending for. But if doctrine is constant and practice is constantly changing, the result is living orthodoxy, which I propose is the faithful third way.” (146-147)

"Maybe our crucifixion is in knowing that for all we'd like to believe to the contrary, we don't have the stomach for even such a few, half-baked chances to give up something precious for him as come our way, let alone for giving up, in any sense that really matters, our selves for him."

-Frederick Buechner

"We're all into that born again thing, and that's great, we got to be born again because Jesus says that to Nicodemus. To enter the kingdom of God you got to be born again. But if you tell me you got to be born again, I can tell you you got to sell everything you have and give it to the poor because Jesus said that to one guy too.

I guess that's why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the verses we like."

-Rich Mullins, Quoted by Shane Claiborne, December 8th, 2004 Wheaton College Chapel

Who hath the power (I ask), who hath the power
To rule the sum of the immeasurable,
To hold with steady hand the giant reins
Of the unfathomed deep? Who hath the power
At once to rule a multitude of skies,
At once to heat with fires ethereal all
The fruitful lands of multitudes of worlds,
To be at all times in all places near,
To stablish darkness by his clouds, to shake
The serene spaces of the sky with sound,
And hurl his lightnings,- ha, and whelm how oft
In ruins his own temples, and to rave,
Retiring to the wildernesses, there
At practice with that thunderbolt of his,
Which yet how often shoots the guilty by,
And slays the honourable blameless ones!

-Lucretius, "On The Nature of Things"

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

-W.H. Auden, "The More Loving One"

"I am sorry to say that I cannot think of any division in Christianity- Calvinist/Arminan, Catholic/Protestant, Pentecostal/Cessationist, Seeker/Traditional- where one side is more completely unlikely to appreciate the other position than this one."

-Internet Monk on Young Earth Creationsim