“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
~ Rev. Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God
My Week: Amy Chua
Wall Street Journal, 2/1/2015, p. C4
quote:
The Sudanese American Public Affairs Association invited me to give a conference keynote talk on "The Triple Package," the book I co-wrote last year with Jed, which argues that a blend of insecurity, impulse control and a superiority complex makes some groups and individuals disproportionately successful.
I said yes because I love culture and people, especially ones who like me. As my favorite fictional character, Lucky Jim, said, "nice things are nicer than nasty ones."
quote from The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, by Alan Jacobs, including quotes from Lewis's book Surprised by Joy on his coming to faith:
quote:
His experience with Christianity was, as we have seen, almost completely a matter of painful and fearful duty. He struggled incessantly to form prayers that he could believe were completely valid, but he never knew whether he had achieved that goal. He was on a spiritual treadmill with no hopes of getting off.
What Miss Cowie’s* mushy spiritualism held out to him was the possibility of there being Something out there, some Higher Power, or Deeper Meaning, or Spirit World—in short, a version of the transcendent that gave richness of possibility but made no demands on anyone.
“From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought, where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting.”
Freed from the burdens of prayer, by the time he left Malvern Jack had ceased to be a Christian. “And oh, the relief of it!”
As he grew older the hermetic—that is, the secretive—aspects of the occult recommended themselves to him: “The idea that if there were Occult knowledge it was known to very few and scorned by the many became an added attraction: ‘we few’… was an evocative expression for me.”
Certainly the older Lewis felt that he had been in real danger at that time of his life: “If there had been in the neighbourhood some elder person who dabbled in dirt of the Magical kind (such have a good nose for potential disciples) I might now be a Satanist or a maniac.”
(C.S. Lewis later came to a mature understanding and a mature faith in Jesus Christ.)
The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, by Alan Jacobs, HarperOne, 2009, page 39, Kindle edition, as of 4/9/2026
* Note: Miss Cowie was a dorm mother and nurse at Cherbourg School.
"The roots of anger are almost always found in some kind of pain…when anger is present, look for the pain."
~ R.C. Sproul In Search of Dignity
Jeremy Hansen, Canadian Astronaut, NASA mission Artemis II, April, 2026
quote:
During the interview in January in Houston he said that to prepare for Artemis II he had gone on a vision quest with a Canadian Indigenous elder to grapple with a question: How can I possibly be happy when people are dying and suffering?
He finally came to an answer: “All you have to do is wake up every day and just use your energy for good.”
“You can’t fix all the problems in the world, but you can influence the little bit around you, and that’s just a simple recipe for allowing yourself to feel that joy,” Mr. Hansen said.
source:
"They’re Going to the Moon and They Know Not Everyone Is With Them"
Can the four astronauts of the NASA mission Artemis II make a difference in a distracted and divided world?
By Timothy Bella, March 31, 2026
Timothy Bella interviewed the four astronauts of Artemis II as well as their family members, a former football coach, co-workers and a college roommate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/science/nasa-artemis-ii-mission-astronauts.html?nl=the-morning&segment_id=217562
