“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.

“That his work cannot now be read at all without trouble, nor understood and valued in detail without sustained effort, is due under God to wyrd [fate/personal destiny], the doom of men to live briefly in a world where all withers and is forgotten. The English language has changed — but not necessarily improved! — in a thousand years. Wyrd has swept away to oblivion nearly all its kin; but Beowulf survives: for a time, for as long as learning keeps any honour in its land. And how long will that be? God ana wat” [God alone knows.] (J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, 275).

“The chief of those Geatish men had accomplished all his proud vaunt before the East Danes, and had healed, moreover, all the woe and the tormenting sorrow that they had erewhile suffered and must of necessity endure, no little bitterness. Of this a clear token it was when that warrior bold had set the hand, the arm and shoulder, beneath the widespread roof — there was Grendel’s clutching limb entire” (J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, 36).

Vivid excerpt from John Milton’s Samson Agonistes.

My self, my Sepulcher, a moving Grave,
Buried, yet not exempt
By privilege of death and burial
From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs,
But made hereby obnoxious more
To all the miseries of life,
Life in captivity
Among inhuman foes.
But who are these? for with joint pace I hear
The tread of many feet stearing this way;
Perhaps my enemies who come to stare
At my affliction, and perhaps to insult,
Thir daily practice to afflict me more.

Carl Trueman, over at First Things, reflects on how then shall the Church protest. Trueman’s concluding thoughts.