The man whose soul is "growing" takes more interest in spiritual things every year. . . . The ways, and fashions, and amusements, and recreations of the world have a continually decreasing place in his heart. He does not condemn them as downright sinful, nor say that those who have anything to do with them are going to hell. He only feels that they have a constantly diminishing hold on his own affections and gradually seem smaller and more trifling in his eyes.

Without Biblical authority, or any other right under the sun, carnal religious leaders have introduced a host of attractions that serve no purpose except to provide entertainment for the retarded saints. It is now common practice in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. . . . One can only conclude that God's professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games and refreshments.

All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God. Besides, all things are of God; and, therefore, why should it not be lawful to dedicate to his glory everything that can properly be employed for such a purpose?

The chief characteristic of humor is, that it is the sudden and unexpected recognition of incongruity between ideas brought together. We see a large man walking in a pompous and consequential way on the sleety path and next he lies sprawling on the ground. The sudden incongruity of his dignity and his awkward fall is supremely humorous. . . . As an instance we may cite the illustration of our Saviour, the gnat and the camel. Not only is there vivid wit in the parallel of the two animals to the two classes of sins, but a startling incongruity in the image of the huge, sprawling beast going down the dainty throat of the Pharisee.

Over my years as a reader and writer I've found it almost impossible to hold anything in memory unless it's framed by a story: certainly down in words, at least. . . . Even if there isn't a story to encapsulate what we wish to retainwhich is, I think, the way memory worksthere is always, in anything we're able to remember the rest of our lives, a progression, a narrative thread or pattern, or a set of steps leading from A to C. . . . It's for this reason, I believe, that the most pungent and memorable portions of the Bible are cast as storiesAdam and Eve, Moses and Pharaoh, David and Bathsheba, Ruth and Naomi, Balaam and his ass. . . . However anybody feels about narrative, over and above the purposes we can ascribe to the use of story in Scripture, story is the quintessential way in which God has chosen to reveal Himself to us.

Television is a populist medium that not only circumvents all elites, cultural, intellectual, and social, but also renders the print culture increasingly irrelevant. In the West to this point, print has preserved society's past and values; for better or for worse, values today are being most effectively transmitted within the video culture. The cultural mantle has passed from the users of words to the makers of images.

Christianity is sometimes criticized for being "word-centered" and thus insufficiently oriented to visual images or to emotional subjectivity. This, however, cannot be otherwise and is nothing to apologize for. The Word is at the essence of the Christian faith. The faith of the ancient Hebrews was based on God's revelation in language; the faith of their pagan neighbors was based on gods revealed in graven images. This basic conceptual conflict between the priority of language and the priority of images continues.

Total silence is rare, and what we today call "quiet" usually amounts to a little less noise. Many people have never experienced silence. . . . Our households and offices are filled with whirring, buzzing, murmuring, chattering, and whining of the multiple contraptions that are supposed to make life easier. Their noise comforts us in some curious way. In fact, we find complete silence shocking because it leaves the impression that nothing is happening. . . . Think what it says about the inward emptiness of our lives if we must always turn on the tape player or radio to make sure something is happening around us.

Whatever it be that keeps the finer faculties of the mind awake, wonder alive, and the interest above mere eating and drinking, money-making and money-saving; whatever it be that gives gladness, or sorrow, or hopethis, be it violin, pencil, pen . . . is simply a divine gift of holy influence for the salvation of that being to whom it comes, for the lifting of him out of the mire and up on the rock.
reductio ad absurdum of personal liberty. It is ordinary men and women freed by money and social mobility to do anything they want unencumbered by family pressure, community mores, social responsibility, civic duty, or good sense. . . . Los Angeles is a site for Hollywood because, if all the freedom and money go blooey, it's warm enough to sleep on the beach.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive of us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. . . . Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) came across an English romance when he was at his lowest ebb; he had made an all-out effort to win an academic prize, and had won it, but then suffered a breakdown. . . . Broken, barely able to read, Kuyper picked up The Heir of Redclyffe, a novel that doesn't appear to be included in the canon. . . . Kuyper was alone when he finished the book, and later wrote, "What I lived through in my soul in that moment I fully understood only later, yet from that hour, after that moment, I scorned what I formerly esteemed, and I sought what I once dared to despise." The drama of that novel, rawly romantic as it might have been, was used to draw Kuyper over the threshold into conversion. The right book at the right time has that potential.