And the streets of the citie shall be full of boyes and girles playing in the streets thereof:
- Walter Brueggemann: “Our lives are occupied territory… / occupied by a cacophony of voices, / and the din undoes us.” (John Alexander on a related note: “[T]he very structures of modernity and postmodernity … fracture our lives so deeply that they make it almost impossible for us to connect deeply with one another.”)
- Chesterton: “An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this.” (Related: “[F]alling fertility has been making our world older, and I think this is a big reason for the many ways it has been decaying and declining. Old secure folks are less willing to allow risky innovations or changes. They care more about keeping what they have…. Problem is, without sufficient change even what we used to have will slowly fade away.”)
- “[I]t is virtually certain that [Jesus] used Greek at various times in his itinerant ministry.”
- John Alexander: “Our selfishness easily becomes invisible when we’re alone.”
- “Are you acting as a persuader or a manipulator?”
- “[H]e also noticed a profound impact on his spiritual life.” (Related: “Jenny’s uterine cancer has become benign.”)
- “To be sure, guilt and shame haunt us. But for my part, this understanding of our predicament doesn’t cut deep enough.”
More:
So true! So true! So true.
“The invasion of Judah by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE is one of the most consequential events recorded in both the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 18:13-15) and the region’s archaeology.”
“Think of the hick-lib as a collaborator—someone who stands to gain socially, financially & gain better opportunities by helping the regime in power make the normal, sensible population of rural, red parts of the country feel surrounded, discouraged, and despondent.”
Micah 6.6-8: “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow my selfe before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calues of a yeere olde? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rammes, or with tenne thousands of riuers of oyle? shall I giue my first borne for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sinne of my soule?Hee hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doeth the Lord require of thee, but to do iustly, and to loue mercy, and to walke humbly with thy God?”