Alan

“Life is a series of beautiful moments interspersed by great trials. The trick to being happy is to learn to have beautiful moments during the trials. Faith isn’t a belief that God will spare you from problems; it is a belief that he’s still God and will carry you through those problems.”
― W. Lee Warren, I've Seen the End of You: A Neurosurgeon's Look at Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know

“Primatologists have seen this many times in the field: Say a male is fighting with another male. The females largely ignore the conflict, so long as it doesn’t bother them or their children. But then one of the combatants goes off and picks up a baby, who blithely clings to his chest hair or his back. Then he goes over to the male he was having the fight with. If the baby likes the male it’s clinging to, the kid will scream at his opponent if he acts aggressively. So the other male either backs off or is mobbed by friends of the mother, spurred on by the baby’s cries. It’s so effective, in fact, that some males simply carry a baby around as a kind of adorable bodyguard, preventing fights before they start.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Some persons whom I had interviewed had instantaneous “spontaneous recoveries during prayer, including one case in which other cases of such spontaneous recoveries were not known, but their doctors classified the recoveries as anomalies and refused to admit that a miracle had occurred. One doctor also told me of a dramatic, medically inexplicable healing that occurred after prayer, in which case he was an eyewitness, but the surgeon was content to label it a “spontaneous healing.”[151] This approach to classifying data to fit existing naturalistic paradigms inevitably obscures all potential evidence in conflict with the paradigm.”
― Craig S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

“Christians are to live their lives on earth dour and sullen; they enjoy the goods of this world as anyone is entitled. Yet they do so with a constant gratitude expressed through virtuous moderation and with an eye toward the giver of all good gifts. Christians are unified in love of their enemies and are therefore able to endure hatred in return because they know to whom they truly and eternally belong.”
― David Meconi, Christ Unfurled: The First 500 Years of Jesus's Life