“… it is a striking fact that nowhere in the letters of St. Paul does the apostle lay upon the Church the duty of evangelism. The gospel is such a tremendous reality that he cannot possibly keep silent about it … . The tomb is empty, Jesus is risen, death is conquered, God does reign after all. There is an explosion of joy, news that cannot be kept secret. Everyone must hear it. A new creation has begun. One does not have to be summoned to the “task” of evangelism. If these things are really true, they have to be told.” — Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season p151
“In the end, the society we have is not a secular society but a pagan society, a society in which men and women are giving their allegiance to no-gods.” — Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season p150
“An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material embodied practices.” — James K.A. Smith Desiring the Kingdom p26
“The family is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University: “To Fulfill These Rights” June 4, 1965
(Source: lbjlib.utexas.edu)
“To this end [to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities] equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address to Howard University 1965
(Source: lbjlib.utexas.edu)
“Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and practices of the mall - the liturgies of mall and market - that shape our imaginations and how we orient ourselves to the world. Embedded in them is a common set of assumptions about the shape of human flourishing, which becomes an implicit telos, or goal, of our own desires and actions. That is, the visions of the good life embedded in these practices become surreptitiously embedded in us through our participation in the rituals and rhythms of these institutions. These quasi-liturgies effect an education of desire, a pedagogy of the heart. But if the church is complicit with this sort of formation, where could we look for an alternative education of desire?” — James K.A. Smith Desiring the Kingdom p25
“So what would it take to resist the alluring formation of our desire - and hence our identity - that is offered by the market and the mall?” — James K.A. Smith Desiring the Kingdom p24
“By looking carefully at the ways we mediate moral understanding to children, we may learn much about the kind of society we live in and will pass on to future generations… . The argument of this book [The Death of Character] is that for all of our genuine and abiding concern with the moral life of children and the moral life of the nation, the strategies we have devised aggravate rather than ameliorate the problem. Rather than restore character and its attending moral ideals, they are complicit in destroying them.” — James Davison Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil p9
“If vain spending of time, idleness, unprofitableness in men’s places, envy, strife, variance, emulations, wrath, pride, worldliness, selfishness (1 Corinthians 1) be badges of Christians, we have them on us and among us in abundance.” — John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, p56
“If we neglect to make use of what we have received, God may justly hold his hand from giving us more.” — John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, p54