Jason Coleman

…Voters in general really love an ad hominem approach to the political debate. We believe what people say if they’re on our side. We smear groups with the actions of some. The tea party protesters are smeared because some participants cross a line, as they did in Jacksonville, but ACORN is smeared because some people that they hire cut corners and engage in fraud.

My suggestion here is that a debate that so constantly turns to an ad hominem approach can hardly be expected to produce rational results. That’s the trouble with our alternatives. I would gladly vote the Democrats out of office, but then the Republicans would take over. I would gladly vote the Republicans out of office, but then the Democrats would (and have) taken over.

The great equivalence, in my view, is that neither party is willing to have their sacred cow programs examined for effectiveness. They just have a different list of programs they hold sacred.

Henry Neufeld, The Trouble with our Alternatives

Resurrection faith…does not mean believing without evidence in the resurrection as something that has happened and will happen, but rather means trusting in the God who is capable of rescuing even from death. This should be the heart of resurrection faith: trust and hope in God rather than arrogant self-assuredness.

James McGrath in The Burial of Jesus

Now I want to be clear that I believe God can and does speak. If I could summarize the thesis of my book in the size of a tweet, it would be, “God always speaks; we rarely listen.”

Henry Neufeld about his book When People Speak for God

Could the Garden of Eden have lasted very long without predators? Interesting article about death before the fall.

But there was never a dull torment,
and it was grace to live
among the fruits of summer, to love by design,
and walk the startling Earth
for what seemed
an endless resurrection of days.

Diane Ackerman

God is not the patch of meaning on the wound…God is the wound we put our patch of meaning upon.

Peter Rollins

Okay, after the fact I realize that this quote invites misinterpretation. Let me explain.

What’s the wound? Our disillusionment with the world, its suffering, and our place in it.

And then what is God? Is He a band-aid we invent to make our boo-boo feel better? Is He some patch we apply to keep our disillusionment and discontent from getting worse?

No! God is the ultimate reality, and whatever problems we have with the world we also have with Him. Whatever our understanding of God and the world, it had better be able to explain why we ended up wounded, and be more than just a covering to disguise that something’s gone wrong.