Church Of England Quotes

The true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of the newspapers. ~ Thomas Carlyle

And I profess still, that whatsoever the church of England (the church, I say, not every doctor) shall forbid me to say in matterof faith, I shall abstain from saying it, excepting this point, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for my sins. As for other doctrines, I think it unlawful, if the church define them, for any member of the church to contradict them. ~ Thomas Hobbes

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.
[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772] ~ Benjamin Franklin

Is the Church of England an Anglican church? The church did not start in Canterbury, the church did not start in Rome. Whether Canterbury is Anglican or not is immaterial. We are Anglicans. They are the Church of England. ~ Peter Akinola

You have the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Wesleyans, represented in each school, and they are each to take alternate days. ~ Charles Tupper

Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and statesman. During his lifetime he earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar and occupied many public offices, including that of Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in a book published in 1516. He is chiefly remembered for his principled refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be supreme head of the Church of England, a decision which ended his political career and led to his execution as a traitor. In 1935, four hundred years after his death, More was canonized in the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI, and was later declared the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen. He shares his feast day, June 22 on the Catholic calendar of saints, with Saint John Fisher, the only Bishop during the English Reformation to maintain his allegiance to the Pope. More was added to the Anglican Churches' calendar of saints in 1980. Source: Wikipedia ~ Thomas More

In England, we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength has always been in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody
from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung
can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican. Its weaknesses are that nobody pays much attention to it and very few people attend its functions. ~ Auberon Waugh

Twenty-five years from now all religion will be fundamentalist religion, even the Church of England. Wild-eyed "Tutuist" Anglicans will riot in Anzania (formerly the Union of South Africa). They'll force people to play contract bridge at gunpoint and make unbelievers eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. No woman will dare appear in the street without a small, stupid hat like Queen Di's. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

The burdens of taxation, the lack of due representation, and the desire for freedom were unquestionably integral ingredients in the accumulation of grievances that drove many colonials to take up arms against the king.22 Yet religious issues also played their part, not least in intensifying a sense of injustice over the privileged status of the Church of England in the British colonies.23 ~ Alister E. McGrath

I was sent to a nice Church of England girls' school and at that time, after university, a woman was expected to become a teacher, a nurse or a missionary - prior to marriage. ~ Kate Adie

If it is true that rock stars weather into institutions, then Dylan has started now to resemble the Church of England: the dwindling popularity of his product cannot diminish the intensity of the arguments among his congregation. ~ Robert Sandall

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The beatings at Repton were more fierce and more frequent than anything I had yet experienced. And do not think for one moment that the future Archbishop of Canterbury objected to these squalid exercises. He rolled up his sleeves and joined in with gusto. His were the bad ones, the really terrifying occasions. Some of the beatings administered by this man of God, this future Head of the Church of England, were very brutal. To my certain knowledge he once had to produce a basin of water, a sponge and a towel so that the victim could wash the blood away afterwards. No joke, that. Shades of the Spanish Inquisition. ~ Roald Dahl

My heart is in the Church of England but not my mind. ~ Alister Hardy

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one. ~ Christopher Hitchens

For if you look over the State of Religion as it standeth in Christendom, there is no Church whatsoever which will accept you as a Member of its Communion, but upon some particular terms of Belief, or Practice, which Christ never appointed, and it may be such as an honest and a wise Christian cannot consent to. I am not more able to give up my Reason to the Church of England, than to give up my Senses to the Church of Rome; it looks like a Trick in all Churches to take away the use of Mens Reason, that they may render us Vassals and Slaves to all their Dictates and Commands. ~ William Stephens

I believe there is no liturgy in the world, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England. And though the main of it was compiled considerably more than two hundred years ago, yet is the language of it, not only pure, but strong and elegant in the highest degree. ~ John Wesley

The only book Papa had ever read, apart from the Bible, was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He believed that the even greater British Empire would go the same way unless noblemen fought to preserve its institutions, especially the Royal Navy, the Church of England, and the Conservative Party. He was right, Fitz had no doubt. ~ Ken Follett

When it was first proposed to establish laboratories at Cambridge, Todhunter, the mathematician, objected that it was unnecessary for students to see experiments performed, since the results could be vouched for by their teachers, all of them of the highest character, and many of them clergymen of the Church of England. ~ Bertrand Russell

The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it - a bit like Christians in the Church of England. ~ Tony Benn

The Church of England holds very firmly, and continues to hold to the view, that marriage is a lifelong union of one man to one woman. At the same time, at the heart of our understanding of what it is to be human is the essential dignity of the human being. ~ Justin Welby

A church split builds self-righteousness into the fabric of every new splinter group, whose only reason for existence is that they decide they are more moral and pure than their brethren. This explains my childhood, and perhaps a lot about America, too. The United States is a country with the national character of a newly formed church splinter group. This is not surprising. Our country started as a church splinter group. The Puritans left England because they believed they were more enlightened than members of the Church of England, and they were eager to form a perfect earthly community following a pure theology. ~ Frank Schaeffer

Marriage is a paradox second only to life itself. That at the age of twenty or so, with little knowledge of each other and a dangerous overdose of self-confidence, two human beings should undertake to commit themselves for life – and that church and state should receive their vows with a straight face – all this is absurd indeed. And it is tolerable only if it is reveled in as such. A pox on all the neat little explanations as to why it is reasonable that two teenagers should be bound to each other until death. It is not reasonable. It happens to be true to life, but it remains absurd. Down with the books that moralize reasonably on the subject of why divorce is wrong. Divorce is not a wrong; it is a metaphysical impossibility. It is an attempt to do something about life rather than with it - to work out the square root of –I rather than to use it.
Up with the absurdity of marriage then. Let the peasant rejoice. He is a very odd ball on a very odd pool table, and his marriage is one of the few things left to him that will roll properly in this game. And up with the marriage service. Let the peasant go back and read it while he rejoices - preferably in the old unbowdlerized version still used by the Church of England. It is full of death and cast iron. And it is one of the great remaining sanity markers. The world is going mad because it has too many reasonable options, and not enough interest or nerve to choose anything for good. In such a world, the marriage service is ~ Robert Farrar Capon

In the 20th century, the position of the monarch as head of the Church of England was given a meaning which it never had before, .. You took the fact that the monarch was head of the Church of England to mean that the British monarchy was itself a religious or moral institution and the monarchy became a symbol of national public morality. ~ David Starkey

One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith. ~ Lancelot Andrewes

The Church of England is the only church in the world that interferes neither with your politics nor your religion ~ Anthony Trollope

Let's be clear, I'm one of the thicker bishops in the Church of England. ~ Justin Welby

It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins. ~ J.B. Priestley

Roman Catholics have always been able to appeal to the traditions of holy Mother the Church. But the Church of England, as such, has nothing to appeal to. How can we [Anglicans] pretend to appeal to Church traditions, when we have cut ourselves off from the main stream of it and any exposition of it must needs be a raking up of old dead documents, instead of obedience to a living voice? And how can we pretend to appeal to the Bible, when the Bible is for everyman's private interpretation, and not expounded by authority? ~ Ronald Knox

I describe myself as a member of the Church of England, which I suppose is an inoffensive way of saying that you don't believe in anything very much ~ William Somerset Maugham

For the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the German Lutheran Church and many other branches of European Christianity, the message of the religion has become a form of left-wing politics, diversity action and social welfare projects. ~ Douglas Murray

I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England. ~ A. N. Wilson

I'd signed up not just for Christianity but the established Church of England. That has a particular history and I think we rather lost it in the 19th Century, we became so much part of empire and colonialism, the language of the Church Of England still reflects that Victorian time. As the 20th Century developed, not surprisingly people left the church and I can see the church's role in losing people. ~ Alan Green

Parishioners will welcome the assurance, if news of changes and experiments has come their way, that no such changes are contemplated in this parish church; they will not be used as guinea pigs for liturgical experiments. The form used at weddings and at the baptism of their children will be exactly the same as it has been for centuries.

There have been changes in the world around – especially perhaps in the Victorian era, which we are pleased to think of as solid – but human needs are very constant and those who study it will find that the Book of Common Prayer, compiled from ancient sources in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries meets those needs in a manner more realistic than more contemporary efforts in this direction. It is difficult for instance to discover any need in 1966 which is not fittingly brought to God in the 400 year old words of the Litany. So the motto for our public transactions with Almighty God in the churches of our parish will be 'Business as usual'. If any declare that we stick in the mud, we retort that by loyalty to the Prayer Book we stand on a rock. ~ Beeston Parish Paper

You live in days when a lingering, Lot-like religion abounds. The stream of profession is far broader than it once was, but far less deep in many places. A certain kind of Christianity is almost fashionable now. To belong to some party in the Church of England, and show a zeal for its interests
to talk about the leading controversies of the day
to buy popular religious books as fast as they come out, and lay them on your table
to attend meetings
to subscribe to Societies
to discuss the merits of preachers
to be enthusiastic and excited about every new form of sensational religion which crops up
all these are now comparatively easy and common attainments. They no longer make a person singular. They require little or no sacrifice. They entail no cross. ~ J.C. Ryle

Place before your eyes two Precepts, and two only. One is, Preach the Gospel; and the other is
Put down enthusiasm!The Church of England in a nutshell. ~ Mary Augusta Ward

As a parish priest of the Church Of England I promise to look after everyone in the community, not just those who come to church, not just white people, not just the Christians. ~ Alan Green

Virtually unable to attract new capital to the foundering enterprise, the company seized the next year on a novel approach to raising money to fund the embryonic British Empire: a lottery.
With the reluctant approval of King James and the Church of England, the Virginia Company sold lottery tickets to the public, discovering no shortage of gamers willing to hazard hard coinage for the chance to win the 01,000 grand prize, a fortune at a time when the typical working-class family scraped by on little more than a pound a month. Having begun as a corporation, Virginia had evolved into a gamblers' stake with a lively populist following back in England. ~ Bob Deans

An Episcopalian divine once told the Pope that the only difference between their denominations was that "the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong." ~ Benjamin Franklin

Mistress Agatha Brown, she was Church of England, but she just done gone to the Catholics. And it seems they don't hold with places like 3½, not even when they're decently run. ~ Ian Fleming

If we look back in history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find a few that have not in their turns been persecutors and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practised it upon the Puritans. They found it wrong in Bishops, but fell into the practice themselves both there (England) and New England. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Sir Richard Steele has observed, that there is this difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England: the one professes to be infallible, the other to be never in the wrong. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

The Three-Decker

"The three-volume novel is extinct."

Full thirty foot she towered from waterline to rail.
It cost a watch to steer her, and a week to shorten sail;
But, spite all modern notions, I found her first and best -
The only certain packet for the Islands of the Blest.

Fair held the breeze behind us - 'twas warm with lovers' prayers.
We'd stolen wills for ballast and a crew of missing heirs.
They shipped as Able Bastards till the Wicked Nurse confessed,
And they worked the old three-decker to the Islands of the Blest.

By ways no gaze could follow, a course unspoiled of Cook,
Per Fancy, fleetest in man, our titled berths we took
With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed,
And a Church of England parson for the Islands of the Blest.

We asked no social questions - we pumped no hidden shame -
We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came:
We left the Lord in Heaven, we left the fiends in Hell.
We weren't exactly Yussufs, but - Zuleika didn't tell.

No moral doubt assailed us, so when the port we neared,
The villain had his flogging at the gangway, and we cheered.
'Twas fiddle in the forc's'le - 'twas garlands on the mast,
For every one got married, and I went ashore at last.

I left 'em all in couples a-kissing on the decks.
I left the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques.
In endl ~ Rudyard Kipling

A leading humanist scholar and occupied many public offices, including that of Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in a book published in 1516. He is chiefly remembered for his principled refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be supreme head of the Church of England, a decision which ended his political career and led to his execution as a traitor. In 1935, four hundred years after his death, More was canonized in the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI, and was later declared the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen ~ Thomas More

At the first he told them he would; but afterwards he made a demur at the business, and desired first to see my mittimus, which ran to this purpose: That I went about to several conventicles in the county, to the great disparagement of the government of the church of England, etc. When he had seen it, he said that there might be something more against me than was expressed in my mittimus; ~ John Bunyan

The church, although lapsing more and more into deflection from the truth and into a corrupting of apostolic practice, had not instrumental music for 1200 years (that is, it was not in general use before this time); The Calvinistic Reform Church ejected it from its service as an element of popery, even the church of England having come very nigh its extrusion from her worship. It is heresy in the sphere of worship. ~ John Lafayette Girardeau

I am a vicar's daughter and still a practising member of the Church of England. ~ Theresa May

The Churches of the Standing Order were filled with unconverted persons, with many who had grown up in them from infancy, being introduced at that time by christening; and but a small proportion of their members made any claim to a spiritual regeneration. The intuitions of a converted soul recoil from Church associations with those whose only claim to membership in Christ's mystical body is a ceremony performed over an unconscious infant, for the renewed man seeks fellowship with those who, like himself, have exercised faith in Christ's saving merits, and he is likely to take the Scriptures for his guide in seeking his Church home. ~ Thomas Armitage

Pentecost is a feast of conversion. Our minds are converted to Christ in faith; and our hearts are
converted to his mission in charity. Faith and charity are given with the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Everything in the Church is a gift. ~ Francis George

The religion of which you are a part is 7 days a week. It isn't just Sunday, it isn't the block plan, it isn't just 3 hours in church, it isn't just the time you spend in Seminary - it's all the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible. ~ Stephen Hawking

I think that it [the Church] stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonisms in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces towards the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom. ~ H.G.Wells

Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Then we did what we called basically I suppose a club tour in England, which was the time I think that our second album came out, we club toured around the whole country where the venues were hold to five hundreds upwards to that sort of thing you know. ~ John Deacon

When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld. ~ Charles Lyell

Scotland: That garret of the earth - that knuckle-end of England - that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulfur. ~ Sydney Smith

It could fairly be said that the U.S. is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world. As our neighbors to the south elect left-wing or even socialist governments, we are lurching further to the right. As Europe becomes less engaged to the Church, we are becoming more fundamentalist. ~ Graydon Carter

He had forgotten that God saw through the silk robes to the sinful heart, that the only wealth worth having was treasure in heaven, and that even the king had to kneel down in church. Feeling that everyone else was so much more powerful and sophisticated than he was, he had lost sight of his true values, suspended his critical faculties, and placed his trust in his superiors. His reward had been treachery. ~ Ken Follett

If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time. ~ C.S. Lewis

11 WAYS TO BE UNREMARKABLY AVERAGE 1. Accept what people tell you at face value. 2. Don't question authority. 3. Go to college because you're supposed to, not because you want to learn something. 4. Go overseas once or twice in your life, to somewhere safe like England. 5. Don't try to learn another language; everyone else will eventually learn English. 6. Think about starting your own business, but never do it. 7. Think about writing a book, but never do it. 8. Get the largest mortgage you qualify for and spend 30 years paying for it. 9. Sit at a desk 40 hours a week for an average of 10 hours of productive work. 10. Don't stand out or draw attention to yourself. 11. Jump through hoops. Check off boxes. ~ Chris Guillebeau

The goal of a church leader is not to do ministry for people, but rather to do ministry with people. ~ Eugene T. Wilson

We should not forget Adam Smith's perspicuous observation that the "masters of mankind" - in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England - never cease to pursue their "vile maxim": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people. ~ Noam Chomsky

In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, no child's behind left. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The Church was resolved to have a New Testament, and as, after the lapse of more than three hundred years, no handwriting could be proved or disproved, the Church, which like former impostors had then gotten possession of the State, had everything its own way. It invented creeds, such as that called the Apostle's Creed, the Nicean Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and out of the loads of rubbish that were presented it voted four to be Gospels, and others to be Epistles, as we now find them arranged. ~ Thomas Paine

I don't think God is so jealous about our worship of Him that He will want to separate those who serve His purposes, serve His goodness, because they have read a book, even one written by an atheist, and have been moved, or because they have wanted to be fair all their lives, but have never stepped in a church, from those who have heard God's words in church or read His words in the Bible and become convinced by them. ~ Dorothy Day

When the great Greek cry breaks into the Latin of the Mass, as old as Christianity itself, it may surprise some to learn that there are a good many people in church who really do say kyrie eleison and mean exactly what they say. But anyhow, they mean what they say rather more than a man who begins a letter with "Dear Sir" means what he says. "Dear" is emphatically a dead word; in that place it has ceased to have any meaning. It is exactly what the Protestants would allege of Popish rites and forms; it is done rapidly, ritually, and without any memory even of the meaning of the rite. When Mr. Jones the solicitor uses it to Mr. Brown the banker, he does not mean that the banker is dear to him, or that his heart is filled with Christian love, even so much as the heart of some poor ignorant Papist listening to the Mass. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Nowadays, people resort to all kinds of activities in order to calm themselves after a stressful event: performing yoga poses in a sauna, leaping off bridges while tied to a bungee, killing imaginary zombies with imaginary weapons, and so forth. But in Miss Penelope Lumley's day, it was universally understood that there is nothing like a nice cup of tea to settle one's nerves in the aftermath of an adventure- a practice many would find well worth reviving. ~ Maryrose Wood

Being a member of a church means realizing that we are responsible for helping the brothers and sisters around us to grow as disciples of Jesus. In the same way, they are responsible for helping us. We desperately need each other in the daily fight to follow Christ in a world that's full of sin. ~ David Platt

But whenever the church fails to mediate God's counterintuitive delight in broken people, the pain of sin will only be magnified until it suffocates our souls. Good deeds and spiritual lingo can't heal a human heart suffocated by evil. Only grace can. Rich, embodied, earthy charis. ~ Preston Sprinkle

Satan has certainly been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years. The false doctrine of Hell and the Devil has allowed the Protestant and Catholic Churches to flourish far too long. Without a devil to point their fingers at, religionists of the right hand path would have nothing with which to threaten their followers. "Satan leads you to temptation"; "Satan is the prince of evil"; "Satan is vicious, cruel, brutal," they warn. "If you give in to the temptations of the devil, you will surely suffer eternal damnation and roast in Hell."
The semantic meaning of Satan is the "adversary" or "opposition" or the "accuser." The very word "devil" comes from the Indian devi which means "god." Satan represents opposition to all religions which serve to frustrate and condemn man for his natural instincts. He has been given an evil role simply because he represents the carnal, earthly, and mundane aspects of life. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

Does God exist?
Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death, and she had gotten used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents' generation and her grandparents' generation still went to church, said prayers, and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said.
At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience - and that was no small achievement - Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion.
In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: What if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: Man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists.
If God exists, and I truly don't believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might ~ Paulo Coelho

Second, the Church itself is going to have to become more authentic morally, for the greatness of the Gospel is now seen to have become quite trivial and inconsequential in its life. If the Gospel means so little to the Church, if it changes so little, why then should unbelievers believe it? ~ David F. Wells

The biggest thing is to continue to do what you do. A lot of people, when they get to a certain level, start thinking about it too much and they change what they do. ~ Eric Church

Too much preaching nowadays pats the back and tickles the ear, but does not get under the skin. There is no conviction and therefore no conversion. I am thinking not only of the ministry of reproof and rebuke but also of the message of inspiration, of encouragement, of comfort. People go out of church at noon with the depths unstirred, the heart untouched, the conscience unpricked. ~ Vance Havner

The fact is that if the Christian home, church, and school have done their job well and the student has learned well, he may be one of the few on the earth who understand the real world. ~ Jim Berg

England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.
They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.
It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self.
Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope.
Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.

In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore. ~ Ravi Zacharias

If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions. ~ James K.A. Smith

After Titanic it would have been completely foolish for me to go and try and top that. I'm an English girl, I've always loved England, I've never felt the desire to leave it for any particular reason. And whilst I'm ambitious and care very much about what I do, I'm not competitive. I also don't want to act every day of my life. () So it was important to me after Titanic to just remind myself of why it was that I was acting in the first place, which is of course because I love it. ~ Kate Winslet

A friend of ours, the wife of a pastor at a church in Colorado, had once told me about something her daughter, Hannah, said when she was three years old. After the morning service was over one Sunday, Hannah tugged on her mom's skirt and asked. "Mommy, why do some people in church have lights over their heads and some don't?" At the time, I remember thinking two things: First, I would've knelt down and asked Hannah, "Did I have a light over my head? Please say yes!" I also wondered what Hannah had seen, and whether she had seen it because, like my son, she had a childlike faith. ~ Todd Burpo

My geological examination of the country generally created a good deal of surprise amongst the Chilenos: it was long before they could be convinced that I was not hunting for mines. This was sometimes troublesome: I found the most ready way of explaining my employment, was to ask them how it was that they themselves were not curious concerning earthquakes and volcanos? – why some springs were hot and others cold? – why there were mountains in Chile, and not a hill in La Plata? These bare questions at once satisfied and silenced the greater number; some, however (like a few in England who are a century behind hand), thought that all such inquiries were useless and impious; and that it was quite sufficient that God had thus made the mountains. ~ Charles Darwin

Not many of us serve in the Jesus Way. I don't. In fact, I don't see many people in the churches that do. Most of us do fairly worldly jobs in church and call them "service" and adopt a worldly role and call it "servant. ~ Christy Wimber

Christians and Jews hold in common one theological basis for hospitality: Creation. Creation is the ultimate expression of God's hospitality to His creatures. In the words of on rabbi, everything God created is a "manifestation of His kindness. [The] world is one big hospitality inn." As Church historian Amy Oden has put it, "God offers hospitality to all humanity ... by establishing a home.. for all." To invite people into our homes is to respond with gratitude to the God who made a home for us.
In the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, we find another resource for hospitality. The trinity shows God in relationships with Himself. our Three-in-one God has welcomed us into Himself and invited us to participate in divine life. And so the invitation that we as Christians extend to one another is not simply an invitation into our homes or to our tables; what we ask of other people it that hey enter into our lives. ~ Lauren F. Winner

In England, there's a lot of people producing their own work and becoming producers and filmmakers, so they're not constantly waiting around. It can be very scarce for work, so it's important to create the work. ~ Aml Ameen

I think one of the reasons Stephen King's stories work so well is that he places his stories in spooky old New England, where a lot of American folk legends came from. ~ Ted Naifeh

As a Fundamentalist I had discovered while I was in college that it is possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about AD 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than did old Ignatius or Clement, who had been taught by the very apostles themselves, just what the Church is and what it should look like. ~ Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke Of Norfolk

It is the Holy Ghost in us that is everything, and the Father is willing to bestow Him upon the weakest if he will only ask in the spirit of implicit faith and entire self-surrender. My cry these days is for a Pentecost, first on myself and my missionary brethren, and then on the native Church, and then on the heathen at large. ~ Griffith John

The Catholic Church is a thousand times better than your Protestant Church upon that question [of damnation]. The Catholic Church believes in purgatory - that is, a place where a fellow can get a chance to make a motion for a new trial. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

The truth is there's always been someone to tell me what to do. The church. The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can't stand the idea of being alone. I can't bear the thought of being free.
Survivor ~ Chuck Palahniuk

If we don't live in a way that is distinctive from our culture, then why not? If we are going to be satisfied with living our lives like the rest of the world and adding a weekly sermon and a small group Bible study on top, then what exactly are we up to in the church? Isn't there more? And ~ M. Scott Boren

O ye! who teach the ingenious youth of nations, Holland, France, England, Germany or Spain, I pray ye flog them upon all occasions, It mends their morals, never mind the pain. ~ Lord Byron

a myth that the church has very successfully used to its advantage. Many people were under the same impression that there are tons of Scientologists in the film and television business and that we all help each other out. The real truth is that while the church would like you to believe it wields a tremendous amount of influence in Hollywood, that is simply not the case. Throughout my career I knew of one minor casting director who was a Scientologist, but other than that, no real movers and shakers. As a matter of fact, I think identifying myself publicly as a Scientologist probably hurt my career more than it helped it as far as perception was concerned. And while some of the courses the church offered provided me with better communication skills to help land roles, the time, money, and effort I invested certainly didn't outweigh the benefit for me. ~ Leah Remini

Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, The land of spices; something understood. ~ George Herbert

America Is A Gun

England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.

Brazil is football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona's hand.
Germany, an oompah band.
America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
Oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun. ~ Brian Bilston

Are you ready for the rapture of the church
Are you ready for Heaven
Our Lord Jesus Christ now wants all Christians to get into a sense of urgency in our preparation for His second coming. ~ Doris Ijeoma Basil