“When conversations turn from routine to crucial, we’re often in trouble. . . . Two tiny organs seated neatly atop your kidneys pump adrenaline into your bloodstream. You don’t choose to do this. Your adrenal glands do it, and then you have to live with it. . . . The issue at hand, the other person, and a brain that’s drunk on adrenaline and almost incapable of rational thought. It’s little wonder that we often say and do things that make perfect sense in the moment, but later on seem, well, stupid” (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switlzer, Crucial Conversations, 5).

“Literature consists of words, first of all. Yet when Christians talk about literature, it would be easy to get the impression that literature consists of ideas. It does not. . . . A proper respect for language is a prerequisite to producing and understanding literature” (Leland Ryken, Thinking Christianly About Literature from The Christian Imagination, 24).

“Despite the importance of crucial conversations, we often back away from them because we fear we’ll make matters worse. We’ve become masters at avoiding tough conversations” (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switlzer, Crucial Conversations, 3).

“Literature enlarges our world of experience to include both more of the physical world and things not yet imagined, giving the “actual world” a “new dimension of depth” (C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, 29)” (Donald T. Williams, Christian Poetics, Past and Present from The Christian Imagination, 17).

“The crucial conversations we’re referring to are interactions that happen to everyone. They’re the day-to-day conversations that affect your life” (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switlzer, Crucial Conversations, 1.

“In the real world after the fall, as in the literary worlds which represent it, good and evil are so intertwined that the responsibility of discernment cannot be realistically avoided” (Donald T. Williams, Christian Poetics, Past and Present from The Christian Imagination, 13).

“The root cause of many–if not most–human problems lies in how people behave when others disagree with them about high-stakes, emotional issues” (Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switlzer, Crucial Conversations, xiii).

“Here, then, is finally a profoundly Christian understanding of literature which does not merely salvage it for Christian use but finds the very ground of its being in explicitly Christian doctrine: creation, the imago Dei, the “cultural mandate” to subdue the earth” (Donald T. Williams, Christian Poetics, Past and Present from The Christian Imagination, 11).

“One of the tasks of philosophy is clarifying concepts” (Louis P. Pojman, Philosophy, 3).

Excerpt below is from an article you gotta go read.

First, it’s quite common to hear from former evangelicals now within the Mainline Protestant tradition that if evangelicals, with their persistently conservative theology, would only liberalize on such issues as biblical authority and sexual ethics—they’d find a newfound opportunity for cultural influence and increased opportunity to “reach the next generation.” The problem, however, is that the statistical evidence suggests just the opposite: It’s the liberalizing trends of American life that work to calcify vibrant, growing, and orthodox belief. The report indicates that a nominal, religious middle is simply dropping out altogether. The almost-Christianity of liberal Christianity is proving, in the long run, to not be Christianity at all. Either failing to grow or literally dying out, Mainline liberalism offers little as far as attractional gravitas once it surrenders core doctrinal beliefs to progressivism. If anything is clear from the Pew report, it’s that evangelicals should, once and for all, ignore the captains at the helm of the Mainline Titanic.

 Again, this only reinforces Carl Trueman’s recent comments. “For Christians to continue to protest the world in the public square, they need first to be deeply and seriously grounded in the historic, doctrinal, and elaborate Christian faith.”

How will evangelical Christians survive? How will Liberalism be overthrown? It’s easy. Merely hold fast and earnestly contend for the faith handed down.