“It was not rumor but fact that federal troops were stationed in the South on Reconstruction duty while Custer was fighting in the West. How people interpreted that usually depended on their politics”  (James E. Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn, 76).

“Unlike the Civil War, which had been covered by hundreds of correspondents from papers around the country, the Indian wars were covered haphazardly by a small group sent from newspapers that were willing and able to hire reporters to cover the fighting. Only two major newspapers, the Chicago Times and the New York Herald, regularly covered the Indian campaigns between 1867 and 1881. The majority of newspapers were content to rely on wire reports or “exchanges” of stories with the newspapers that had correspondents at the front. Many newspapers also used freelancers and sometimes army officers. Custer himself actually contributed stories to the New York Herald” (James E. Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn, 32).

“The Little Bighorn was a great story for two main reasons: the magnitude of the defeat and the death of Custer. Furthermore, the circumstances of the battle and Custer’s career were controversial, a main characteristic of any good story. . . . Like many of those with outsize personalities, Custer attracted devoted friends but equally bitter enemies in his lifetime, and the fantastic nature of his death has carried the same debate forward among historians and Custer buffs who are sometimes called Custerphiles or Custerphobes, depending on their perspective. Both camps find his life endlessly fascinating, and with good reason, for it includes the highs and lows of a real American character” (James E. Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn, 11).

“Too few Christians today have an adequate grasp of biblical doctrine. This is due to a widespread disinterest in doctrinal preaching and deep reading. . . . This problem, though intensified in our day, is not new. Eighty years ago J. Gresham Machen lamented: ‘The growth of ignorance in the Church is the logical and inevitable result of false notion that Christianity is a life and not also a doctrine; if Christianity is not a doctrine then of course teaching is not necessary to Christianity'” (Kenneth L. Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion, 40).

“Christians should be aware of contemporary theological issues, particular theological formulations impacting evangelicalism” (Kenneth L. Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion, 40).

I’m partial to Robert Louis Wilken’s introductory observation in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought.

I am convinced that the study of early Christian thought has been too preoccupied with ideas. The intellectual effort of the early church was at the service of a much loftier goal than giving conceptual form to Christian belief. Its mission was to win the hearts and minds of men and women and to change their lives. Christian thinkers appealed to a much deeper level of human experience than had the religious institutions of society or the doctrines of the philosophers. In this endeavor the Bible was a central factor (xiv).

Wilken goes on to note that the early church “gave men and women a new love, Jesus Christ, a person who inspired their actions and held their affections” (xv).

“Uniquely charismatic men like Custer, who always seem to be in the right place at the right time, are indeed rare, which is why he was always good copy, as journalists are wont to say. If it is true that he led himself and his men to their deaths at the Little Bighorn in a mad dash for glory, then he was only doing what the press and its voracious readers expected him to do” (James E. Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn, 6).

“According to the Left Behind website, between 1995 and 2008 the series sold sixty million copies. On February 4, 2002, its authors appeared on CBS popular program 60 Minutes and on July 1 of the same year the Left Behind series appeared on the cover of Time magazine as a cultural phenomenon” (Kenneth L. Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion (3rd. ed), 39).

“The central doctrine of pentecostalism, according to one of the movement’s best known leaders, is ‘the abiding possibility and importance of the supernatural element . . . particularly as contained in the manifestation of the Spirit'” (David Edwin Harrell, Jr., All Things Are Possible: The Healings and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America, 11).

“Reformer, scholar, teacher, pastor, husband, father, composer, prayer warrior–all these labels depict Martin Luther. Yet Luther was also a preacher–and a prolific one at that. . . . Generally, he averaged three sermons per week throughout his adult life, but often preached four or more. Luther was, to state it mildly, a homiletical force” (Eds. Keith Willhite and Scott M. Gibson, The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching, 31).