a rending sound

Audrey Assad on deconstruction. Such vivid, accurate imagery.

The words are from Rainier Maria Rilke's Book of Hours

Source

"And all I know is that I still don't know a lot."

Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

Being "spiritual but not religious" could actually be a better prelude to orthodox Christian faith than the kind of vaguely nominal deism that is like God on our money. This sort of longing for a 40's and 50's sort of assumed picture in which everyone in America is a Christian is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. That was never the worship of the triune God, and if people are being honest that they're not signing up for that sort of vaguely American deity, I'm all for that because that's not a prelude to the gospel anyway.

Ignatius of Laodicea, 390 AD

Our “ecosystem of interruption technologies” affects our spiritual and moral lives in every aspect. By our immersion in that ecosystem we are radically impeded from achieving a “right understanding of ourselves” and of God’s disposition toward us. We will not understand ourselves as sinners, or as people made in God’s image, or as people spiritually endangered by wandering far from God, or as people made to live in communion with God, or as people whom God has come to a far country in order to seek and to save, if we cannot cease for a few moments from an endless procession of stimuli that shock us out of thought.

When we understand worship is formative, and that God is the one at work, then sincerity is not the biblical defining feature. Showing up is. I find that liberating. People don’t have to be extroverts for Jesus.

James K.A. Smith on how enchanted, transcendental, sacramental Christianity is the Christianity we need to recover in the face of secularism. So on point.