If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
Overthinking
Somewhere between overthinking and underthinking is responsible and responsive thinking. As a Christian who tries to be a thinking Christian I’ve always taken seriously the discipleship of the intellect, the Christian mind, or as Anselm called it “faith seeking understanding.”
Jim Gordon
Contemplation
It is impossible to shift priorities if we are in a constant, busy, frenetic lifestyle. There has to be that pause, that breath, that waiting, that willingness to be still until we know. Be still and know—but the stillness doesn’t immediately lead to knowing. At first, we have to be still, and then we have to be patient until the knowing comes about.
Barbara Holmes
Doubt
I’m not describing atheists, apostates, or “exvangelicals” here. This is how many ordinary Christians feel. Or at least, it’s the water they swim in, the intrusive thought in the back of the mind, the semi-conscious source of inertia they feel when the alarm blares on Sunday morning. American Christians face no Colosseum, but this emotional and intellectual pressure is very real. The doubts add up.
It doesn’t help that doubt is in vogue. Doubt is sexy, and not only in the wider culture. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been told by a pastor or Christian professor that doubt is a sign of spiritual maturity. That faith without doubt is superficial, a mere honeymoon period. That doubt is the flip side of faith, a kind of friend to fidelity. That the presence of doubt is a sign of a healthy theological mind, and its absence—well, you can fill in the rest.
The pro-doubt crowd gets two important things entirely right. First, they want space to ask honest questions. Second, they want to remove the stigma of doubt.
Brad East
Human Behavior
“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
Viktor Frankl
True Professional
Edward Said has called the true intellectua: one who pursues their craft not as a profession, working 9-5, but rather for the love of the thing itself.
A language
“You need a language with which to express things, which at a certain age you felt you could do yourself, and gradually, somehow, it’s like switching from pastel paint to heavy oils.”
born to be happy
Solzhenitsyn observed, if “man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die.” And as he pointed out, if such a credo holds, “for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good?”
Survivors
Only those who have tried to breathe under water know how important breathing really is, and will never take it for granted again. They are the ones who do not take shipwreck or drowning lightly. They’re the ones who can name “healing” correctly, the ones who know what they have been saved from, and the only ones who develop the patience and humility to ask the right questions of God and of themselves.
Only the survivors know the full terror of the passage, the arms that held them through it all, and the power of the obstacles that were overcome. All they can do is thank God they made it through! For the rest of us it is mere speculation, salvation theories, and “theology.”
Richard Rohr
Believing in God
“To me it comes down to this question: do I choose to believe in a universe that is self created, whose laws are self created, where life is ordered out of nothing, or do I choose to believe in a universe that is an expression of the power, beauty, and will of a God whose origins I cannot explain? Both require a measure of faith. I choose to believe that there is a God whose handiwork is seen in the cosmos, who created the laws that order our universe, and who brought forth life on our planet.”
“I believe in God because I believe God is the best explanation for the universe we live in. I believe in God because I’ve experienced what I believe is God’s presence and my life has been positively affected by my faith. I believe in God because I’m drawn to Jesus, and Jesus believed in God. But I also believe in God because I see the impact faith in God has had on the lives of so many people, and through them, on the world.”
Adam Hamilton
extremes
The far left will always end up in failure because they reject the reality of sin…the far right will fail because they believe they are without it…
Phoenix Preacher