Quotes about Perception

One reason the broader world does not look to Christianity for guidance is that we Christians have not spoken with a credible voice.

Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class throughout his presidency, winning the grudging respect of reporters who had once questioned his religious talk as a political ploy. Even so, he lost many Christians' votes to Ronald Reagan, the only U.S. president to have been divorced and who rarely attended church and gave little to charity, mainly because Reagan supported many of the favorite causes of the religious Right.

and said, almost without thinking, "Well, of course, Philip, God was already present in the prison. I just had to make him visible." I have often thought of that line from Joanna, which would make a fine mission statement for all of us seeking to know and follow God. God is already present, in the most unexpected places. We just need to make God visible.

The reason we fear to go out after dark is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who have been taught that nothing is superior to their own needs or feelings.

H. L. Mencken described a Puritan as a person with a haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy; today, many people would apply the same caricature to evangelicals or fundamentalists.

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist.

Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things . . . as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist. My own rules seem necessary; other people's rules seem excessively strict.

do worry about the recent tendency for the labels "evangelical Christian" and "religious right" to become interchangeable. Increasingly Christians are perceived as rigid moralists who want to control others' lives.

In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts laments the loss of "deep reading," which requires intense concentration, a conscious lowering of the gates of perception, and a slower pace.

But that didn't happen. Somehow, he was standing on solid ground that looked anything but solid.

Morally judging cultures (except Christian, Israeli and American cultures) is forbidden by the left. Indeed not judging non-Western cultures is the very definition of 'multiculturalism'.