Sex is not sinful, but sin has perverted it.
Envy yearns to find flaws.
Rome, on the other hand, lost—suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of W...
[I]f you seek in every way to minimise my firm beliefs by your anti-feminist attacks, please recall that a small dagger or knife point can pierce a great, bulging sack and that a small fly can attack a great lion and speedily put him to flight.
When Edward Gibbon was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, he could argue that transportation hadn't changed since ancient times. An imperial messenger on the Roman roads could get from Rome to London even faster in A...
If the focus of our testimony is our changed life, we as well as our hearers are bound to be disappointed.
Our greatest fear as individuals & as a church should not be of failure, but of suceeding at things in life that dont really matter.
She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife – flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave – she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared.
Will-," Tessa began but it was too late, Church made a yowling noise at being woken, and lashed out with his claws. Will began to swear. Tessa left, unable to hide the slightest of smiles as she went.
Church was doing what he often did when dropped - lying on his back with all four legs in the air, pretending to be dead in order to induce guilt in his owners.
The wealthy, Jesus says, can only get into heaven through the eye of a needle; the same applies to churches wealthy in numbers and programs.
Sola scriptura means at least this: that the church's proclamation is always subject to potential correction from the canon. It is for this reason that we resist simply collapsing the text into the tradition of its interpretation and performance.
God (mentally on my knees), if I can just get through this night, I'll come to church. On Christmas. Every fifteen years. For the next fifteen years. So once.
The real origin of the democratic spirit - and most likely, many democratic institutions - lies precisely in those spaces of improvisation just outside the control of governments and organized churches.
She throws her jeans at me and dives into the pellucid lake, slicing through the water almost without a splash. A church bell rings out in the distance, echoing in the quiet aftermath of Everly’s quick jump into the unexpected.
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.
...when I was a kid, Toronto streets were deserted and quiet on Sundays, except for the sound of church bells I stood on the sidewalk one December listening to the Christmas bells - I've never forgotten that moment...
It can be unhelpful to wax eloquent about the inerrancy of Scripture without an accompanying acknowledgment that, while Scripture may be inerrant, there are no inerrant interpreters of Scripture.
There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.
Our wives, our families, and our churches need godly men who have discernment--discernment to deal with life and life-issues on a spiritual level.
