Quotables

"...In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in Hell it is called Despair. … It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for...."

Dorothy Sayers
“The Six Other Deadly Sins”

"...The business of the ecclesiastics is to teach the artist an intellectual Catholic dogma, soak it well into him, and then, when he’s properly saturated, leave him to get on with his job in his own way..."

Dorothy Sayers
Letters

"...I ask that the Church should use a decent humility before the artist, whose calling is as direct as that of the priest, and whose business it is to serve God in his own technique and not in somebody else’s..."

Dorothy Sayers
Letters

"...No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself…. work must be good work before it can call itself God’s work..."

Dorothy Sayers
Why Work?

"...Christ has come to defeat the powers and principalities, to move the world over onto a new foundation, and to equip a people – informed, devout, determined people – to lead the way in righting what’s wrong, in transforming what's corrupted, in doing the things that make for peace, expecting that these things will travel across the border from this world to the new heaven and earth..."

Cornelius Plantinga
Engaging God’s World

"...If he writes with his eye on the spiritual box-office, he will at once cease to be a dramatist, and decline into a manufacturer of propagandist tracts. . . . He will lose his professional integrity, and with it all his power, including his power to preach the Gospel..."

Dorothy Sayers
Playwrights Are Not Dramatists

"...Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet..."

Frederick Buechner
Wishful Thinking

"...We live by mercy if we live.
To that we have no fit reply
But working well and giving thanks,
Loving God, loving one another,
To keep Creation’s neighborhood ..."

Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir

"...Renewals and revolutions begin quietly, like faith itself. They start growing from one tiny seed, the staggering thought: things don’t have to be like this..."

John V. Taylor
Bishop of Winchester

"...The point is that if we stay away from secular culture to protect ourselves from its temptations, we cannot live and witness in the real world. We can’t even understand it..."

Cornelius Plantinga
Engaging God’s World

"...The homeliest service that we doe in an honest calling, though it be but to plow, or digge, if done in obedience, and conscience of God’s Commandment, is crowned with an ample reward; whereas the best workes for their kinde (preaching, praying, offering Evangelicall sacrifices) if without respect of God’s injunction and glory, are loaded with curses. God loveth adverbs; and cares not how good, but how well..."

Joseph Hall
Bishop of Norwich and Puritan Divine

"...If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys..."

Wendell Berry
"Two Economies"

"...The word ‘mass’ is said to be derived from the final sentence of the old Latin rite, ite missa est. In polite English it might be rendered, ‘Now you are dismissed.’ In more blunt language it could be just, ‘Get out!’ – out into the world which God made and God-like beings inhabit, the world into which Christ came and into which he now sends us. For that is where we belong. The world is the arena in which we are to live and love, witness and serve, suffer and die for Christ..."

John Stott
New Issues Facing Christians Today

"...What is the grand malady of nations? The answer is short. Selfishness...It is important to notice how much Christianity in every way is set in direct hostility to selfishness. Consequently, the public welfare must be inseparable from her prevalence.

One may almost say that the main object and chief concern of real Christianity is to root out our natural selfishness and to correct the false standard it would impose upon us. Christianity seeks to bring us to a just estimate of ourselves, and of all around us...Benevolence-enlarged, vigorous, operative benevolence is her master principle..."

William Wilberforce
Real Christianity
Member of Parliament, 18th-century

"...True charity is wakeful, fervent, full of concern, full of good offices, not so easily satisfied, not so ready to believe that everything is going well as a matter of course. Rather, it is jealous of mischief, likely to suspect danger, and prompt to extend relief..."

William Wilberforce
Real Christianity
Member of Parliament, 18th-century