Wes Molebash > Wes's Quotes

“Hunter argues that evangelical Christian attempts to “change the world” through politics—electing the right candidates, who will then pass the right laws and approve the right justices for the Supreme Court—have largely failed.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Despite God’s commands to trust him in times of despair, evangelicals have always been very fearful people, and they have built their understanding of political engagement around the anxiety they have felt amid times of social and cultural change.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Evangelical social critic Ronald Sider has said that too many evangelicals believe “life begins at conception and ends at birth.”15”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“We are operating more out of fear than out of trust in God. We are afraid, and there is no good result from engaging the world from a place of fear. . . . It causes us to trust in the wrong people and the wrong things to protect us. I see it in us. We are turning to the wrong saviors. We think our salvation lies somewhere where it does not. [We are] grasping at power in our current cultural atmosphere and trying to maintain influence. By the way, that’s not the way to get influence—to continue grasping at it desperately. . . . The person who is afraid long enough will always turn angry. Fear never leads to peace. Fear never leads to joy. It always leads to anger, usually anger at those who are not like you.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Despite the biblical passages exhorting followers of Christ to “fear not,” it is possible to write an entire history of American evangelicalism as the story of Christians who have failed to overcome fear.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Evangelicals can do better than Donald Trump. His campaign and presidency have drawn on a troubling pattern of American evangelicalism that is willing to yield to old habits grounded in fear, nostalgia, and the search for power. Too many of its leaders (and their followers) have traded their Christian witness for a mess of political pottage and a few federal judges. It should not surprise us that people are leaving evangelicalism or no longer associating themselves with that label—or, in some cases, leaving the church altogether.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Haidt summarizes, “The author of Ecclesiastes wasn’t just battling the fear of meaninglessness; he was battling the disappointment of success. . . . Nothing brought satisfaction.”2 This is an abiding human problem, and there is plenty of modern empirical research that backs it up. Studies find a very weak correlation between wealth and contentment, and the more prosperous a society grows, the more common is depression.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Haidt, for example, believes that Buddha and the Greeks “took things too far.”7 He argues that modern research shows some external circumstances do correlate with increased satisfaction. In particular, love relationships are important, and therefore the advice of emotional detachment may actually undermine happiness.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“If you are younger, it is natural to say to yourself, “I have heard about these disillusioned celebrities and wealthy people who say their life isn’t happy. But if I get anything like what I’m hoping for, I’ll be different.” No you won’t.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Of course, not even the strongest believers love God perfectly, nor does anyone get close to doing so. Yet to the degree you move toward loving him supremely, things begin to fall into order, into their proper places in your life. Instead of looking to the things of the world as the deepest source of your contentment, you can enjoy them for what they are. Money and career, for example, become just what they are supposed to be. Work becomes work, a great way to use your gifts and be useful to others. Money becomes just money, a great way to support your family. But these things are not your source of safety and contentment. He is.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Here, then, is the message. Don’t love anything less; instead learn to love God more, and you will love other things with far more satisfaction.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.23”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as . . . not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual thing to worship. . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. . . . Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. . . . Worship power— you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Not only do your desires contradict, but they also are elusive. “What are the wants of the self?” Bellah asks. “For all its unmistakable presence and intensity on occasion, the experience of feeling good, like being in love, is so highly subjective that its distinguishing characteristics remain ineffable.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“Ordinary moralistic religion operates on this principle: “I live a good and moral life; therefore God accepts me.” Gospel Christianity operates in the opposite way: “God accepts me unconditionally in Jesus Christ; therefore I live a good and moral life.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“We are irreducibly hope-based creatures.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“If human rights and equality exist “just because we say so,” then activists are not able to persuade, only to coerce. They can force cultures to adopt Western, individualistic ideas of rights and equality by using money, political power, or even military force. But, the charge goes, all this is just the latest stage in the West’s inveterate bent to domination and colonialism. Western nations are now doing what they’ve always done, but disingenuously now, under the banner of “human rights.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

“People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size in the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“Jupiter acts as a gravitational shield for Earth, a burly big brother, allowing long (hundred-million-year) stretches of relative peace and quiet on Earth. Without Jupiter’s protection, complex life would have a hard time becoming interestingly complex, always living at risk of extinction from a devastating impact.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers. Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“In a Gays-vs.-Christians world, admitting you’re gay makes you the enemy of Christians. After hearing some of these people’s horror stories, I’m amazed that any of them have any faith left at all.”
― Justin Lee, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate

“Of course, we miss all this when we insist the Bible’s origin stories are simply straightforward recitations of historical fact, one scientific discovery or archaeological dig away from ruin. What both hardened fundamentalists and strident atheists seem to have in common is the conviction that any trace of myth, embellishment, or cultural influence in an origin story renders it untrue. But this represents a massive misunderstanding of the genre itself.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

“The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say. You can bend it until it breaks. For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We’re all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free?”
― Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

“Involuntary servitude was banned by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, but nothing was done to confront the ideology of white supremacy. Slavery didn’t end in 1865; it just evolved.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“The Confederate flag had been raised above the South Carolina statehouse in 1962—in direct defiance of racial integration and the civil rights movement3—and has been used as an emblem of white hate and violence against black people ever since. It is therefore an anti-Christian flag that helped inspire the murder of black Christians on June 17, 2015.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“But no matter where you go as a white person in American society, no matter where you live, no matter who your friends and allies are, and no matter what you do to help overcome racism, you can never escape white privilege in America if you are white.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“As I have talked with black friends about this book, especially with black parents, the line that has elicited the most response is this one: “If white Christians acted more Christian than white, black parents would have less to fear for their children.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“The story about race that was embedded into America at the founding of our nation was a lie; it is time to change that story and discover a new one.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“I have always learned the most about the world by going to places I was never supposed to be and being with people I was never supposed to meet.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America