From Fleming Rutledge’s Advent: “I asked my mother yesterday to tell me why, in our family when I was growing up, we did not decorate our house until Christmas Eve. I knew the answer, of course—we were conscientious Episcopalians—but I wanted to hear what she would say. She surprised me. She said, ‘I think Christmas should come in a burst.’ Exactly. Auden writes, ‘Nothing can save us that is possible.’ The human race cannot expect to receive any lasting comfort... Read more

From Fleming Rutledge’s Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus: “One of the most excruciating passages of literature that I have ever read is about a Christmas dinner. It is in William Styron’s novel—his best by a long way, in my opinion—called Lie Down in Darkness. The family whose desperate and doomed lives make up the plot of the novel gather around the table. It is gorgeously laid with the family silver, linens, and crystal (this takes place in... Read more

From David Zahl’s Seculosity: “Christianity at its sustaining core is not a religion of good people getting better, but of real people coping with their failure to be good. . . Your life depends on letting go of control.” Read more

From Eugene Peterson’s Practice Resurrection: “Why doesn’t Jesus advertise himself? If he wants to be known as God present with us, to heal and save and bless, why doesn’t he get our attention and let us know pointblank what is going on? If all those verbs and nouns that Paul has spread out for us to consider and receive are the real thing, why doesn’t Jesus at least raise his voice? The short answer: God reveals himself in personal relationship... Read more

From Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark: “For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying... Read more

From Eugene Peterson’s Subversive Spirituality: “We do not progress in the Christian life by becoming more competent, more knowledgeable, more virtuous, or more energetic. We do not advance in the Christian life by acquiring expertise. Each day, and many times each day, we return to Square One: God Said. We are constantly being ‘thrown back on the start and always opening up afresh.’. . .I want to simplify your lives. When others are telling you to read more, I want... Read more

From Tish Harrison Warren and Andy Crouch’s Liturgy of the Ordinary: “The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary. I often want to skip the boring, daily stuff to get to the thrill of an edgy faith. But it’s in the dailiness of the Christian faith—the making the bed, the doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, the reading the Bible, the quiet, the small—that God’s transformation takes root... Read more

From Nancy Guthrie’s (editor) Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus: “For the Son of God to empty himself and become poor meant a laying aside of glory; a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of hardship, isolation, ill-treatment, malice, and misunderstanding; finally, a death that involved such agony – spiritual, even more than physical – that his mind nearly broke under the prospect of it. It meant love to the uttermost for unlovely men, who ‘through his poverty, might become rich.’... Read more

From Fleming Rutledge’s Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus: “Where is God when it is dark? The church proclaims that he never hides himself to no purpose. Somewhere, somehow, in spite of all appearances, his vindication awaits the proper moment. At the heart of the Advent season is the proclamation that God did not remain where he was, high above the misery of his creation, but came down, incognito, into the midst of it. Nor did he come... Read more

From Paul David Tripp’s Awe: “Every awesome thing in creation is designed to point you to the One who alone is worthy of capturing and controlling the awe of your searching and hungry heart.” Read more