christian living on Oxymoron

Humble. Before Jesus, almost no pagan author had used “humble” as a compliment. Yet the events of Christmas point inescapably to what seems like an oxymoron: a humble God. The God who came to earth ca...

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live, taking the form of a readiness to die.

Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

Sometimes the curses of the godless sound better than the hallelujahs of the pious.

Put light against light - you have nothing. Put dark against dark - you have nothing. It's the contrast of light and dark that each give the other one meaning.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Blessed are the liars, / For the truth can be awkward.

If the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the . . . unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar...

Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door. …………………………...

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

To see sin without grace is despair. To see grace without sin is arrogance. To see them in tandem is conversion.

For though [something] be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately.

Holiness can read like a long, exhausting list.

In order to speak of the crucified God we need a theology of abandonment, of dereliction, of an alienation so profound that it can only be expressed in language marked by paradox and by great daring a...

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

There are times when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence.

He rightly reads scripture who turns words into deeds.

The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination. A capital destroyed him in his tenement… It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud: The assassin flash and rumble . . . He was denied. Phantoms, ...

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest...

"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and i...

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am...

He . . . who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

There is something profoundly hypocritical about praising God for God’s mighty deeds of salvation and cooperating at the same time with the demons of destruction, whether by neglecting to do good or b...

Dinner is a cacophonous exercise of holy sanctification.

There are only two kinds of people: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mounta...