"Viewing people from the perspective of who God is making them into in Christ transforms our entire attitude. And focusing on our interdependence as the body of Christ transforms our commitment. Scripture doesn't envision Christians apart from a local church, nor the local body apart from the entire church."

-----Notes on 1 Corinthians 1:4-9, from the Faith in Action Study Bible (World Vision)


"I don't want God to accept me the way I am. I want God to transform me, to make me perfect. Of course, the church rightly says to people, 'We want you to know the joy of the life of what it means to worship God.' But you're going to need a lot of transformation to be part of this kind of community because your life cannot remain the same when you become a member of the church of Jesus Christ. All your desires and loyalties must be directed to the worship of God, and that means, for example, you're not going to be a good American anymore. You're not going to believe that church and flag go easily together. And it may well change your friendships. You may not be able to be friends with some because their way of life is corrupting.

I don't believe in the 'you are accepted' ideology. It is a way of our escaping the necessity of judgment on ourselves and a way to ensure we will have shallow souls. I'm not for accepting people the way they are. As Mark Twain observed, 'About the worst advice you can give anyone is to be themselves.'"

-----Stanley Hauerwas

"For Leigh Fermor, literature is not something simply to conjure with, still less something to theorize about; it is both incantatory music and a body of accumulated wisdom, and one can live by its ordinances, or on its wealth of suggestion, much as a minister lives by the Scriptures."

-----Anthony Lane, from the New Yorker. May 22, 2006: "An Englishman Abroad: Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey through the twentieth century."

"Quite often [he] would not speak at all, not out of any hostility but simply because the capacity for random conversation seemed to him less a grace than a certain expression of a weak mind. . ."

-----Joan Didion, "Run River"