“God is of no importance unless He is of utmost importance.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

“Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.”

– Abraham Joshua Heschel

“If the good Lord sent the ten plagues of Egypt on New York City, I don’t think New York would even notice.”

– From a Garrison Keillor sketch

Much is made in churches of the “good news” of the gospels. Less is said of the gospel’s bad news, which is that Jesus would have been horrified by just about every “Christian” government the world has ever seen. He would be horrified by our government and its works, and it would be horrified by him.

– Wendell Berry, Christianity and The Survival of Creation

“From the very beginning the movement has been characterized by Quaker principles. The laws of the Kingdom, laid down by our elder brother, Jesus Christ in His Sermon on the Mount, have been unqualifiedly adopted, consequently the movement has found itself opposed to the spilling of the blood of any man, or of offering resistance to any aggression. Every branch of the movement, whether in the United States, Canada, Great Britain or Germany, has held to this principle.”

— Stanley Frodsham, General Secretary of the Assemblies of God, 1917

Quoted in Historical and Theological Origins of Assemblies of God Pacifism by Paul Alexander

“In the face of all-annihilating weapons, the natural next step may be the use of no weapons. It may be the only possibly effective defense against the ultimate weapon is no weapon at all. It may be that the presence of nuclear weapons in the world serves notice that the command to love one another is an absolute practical necessity, such as we never dreamed it to be before, and that our choice is not to win or lose, but to love our enemies or die.”

— Wendell Berry, Property, Patriotism and National Defense

People talk about revelation, and say it has ceased; but what ignorance it bespeaks, when man knows not the least thing on earth without revelation.

— Elias Hicks

…If you had been living in Jesus’ time and had heard him teaching, would you have been one of his followers?
Continue reading “Follow you? Follow who? Who, me?”

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance…. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another’s lives, of things we need and use.

— Wendell Berry, Christianity and The Survival of Creation

To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God.

— Wendell Berry, Christianity and The Survival of Creation