Quotes
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The Spiritual Discipline of Fairy Tales
I do not mean that school stories for boys and girls ought not to be written. I am only saying that they are far more liable to become ‘fantasies’ in the clinical sense than fantastic stories are. And this distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim…
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A Child Again
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown-up. C.S. Lewis, Other Worlds (1975), 25.
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A Sentence That Stretches Into Eternity
The tension (a weak word) between the temporality of sentences and the eternity that would render them and the strivings they portray superfluous is powerfully captured in my final example, a sentence from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Although I have read and taught this sentence hundreds of times, it never fails to knock my…
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Learning to See Through the Eyes of our Forebears
Christian classics—such as Athanasius’ treatise On the Incarnation or Augustine’s Confessions—possess the ability to tether us to our collective past, offering us resources that not only inform us about our faith but also reveal the blind spots of our own chronological parochialism. They anchor us to a continuous tradition of reflection, allowing us to see…
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What Matters Supremely
What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in…
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Have We Been Transformed?
The ultimate test of whether we have grasped theological truth is thus not so much whether we have comprehended it rationally, but whether it has transformed us experientially. In an important sense, we are not called on to master theology, but to allow it to master us. Alister McGrath, J.I. Packer: His Life and Thought,…