On Mother’s Day I mentioned Kevin Durant’s tribute to his mother in his MVP speech. Here it is:
Research shows a husband really can be nagged to death.
Gollum wasn’t evil; he just had a Vitamin D deficiency.
We’ll need this in Austin soon: The rain that filters through this house’s “bio-concrete” is clean enough to drink.
“Pun Slams,” sort of like “poetry slams,” but with plenty of groans.
Psychologist Linda Crane, on her son’s diagnosis of schizophrenia: “It took me a long time to come to terms with it. Even I had a hard time understanding it, how this bright man, with a brilliant future, could suffer like this. One thing I learned was that as soon as you mentioned the word, people stopped seeing the person. They just saw the diagnosis and a collection of symptoms. Doug, my son, was forgotten.” Great quote from a great article about the Schizophrenia Oral History Project.
David Mathis: “At the end of his important essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien [author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings] explains from where he intends his tales to draw their power — from the emotional reservoir of the Christian gospel. The “primary world” story of the Son of God himself, taking full humanity at Christmas, living flawlessly in our fallen world, sacrificing himself to rescue us on Good Friday from God's just wrath, and rising again victorious on Easter as the living Lord of the Universe — here is the Story for which God made the human heart and the Story from which all good stories derive their power….Finding Jesus in The Hobbit doesn’t mean shoe-horning Gandalf or Bilbo or any other character into some Christ mold, but following the story, truly tracking its twists, feeling its angst, and knowing that the “turn” — the Great Unexpected Rescue just in the nick of time, the place where our souls are most stirred, relieved, and satisfied — is tapping into something deep in us, some way in which God spring-loaded us for the Great Story and the extent to which he went to reclaim us.”
In his NYT opinion column, Ross Douthat reminds us that the New Testament documents are a much more reliable guide to Jesus than the later “gospels” that we’ve heard about: “What's true of the new text [claiming Jesus had a wife] has been true of nearly every alternative gospel, ‘lost’ or otherwise, that ended up excluded from the Christian canon….[N]one of the endless apocryphal documents can compete with the actual New Testament - and particularly the synoptic gospels and the Pauline epistles - when it comes to historical proximity to the events of Jesus's life. They're useful windows into the religious trends of subsequent centuries, but they tell us next to nothing about what Jesus and his earliest followers thought and did and said.” Douthat says the popularity of the “alternative” gospels “tells us much more about the religious preoccupations of our own era, and particularly the very American desire to refashion Jesus of Nazareth in our own image rather than letting go of him altogether, than it does about the Jesus who actually lived.”
It’s a popular argument among progressive Christians that, since Jesus said nothing about homosexuality it must not have mattered to him. Wesley Hill, who writes about staying biblically-faithful amidst same-sex attractions, explains the errors in this thinking.
How to Write for Busy Readers. I try to follow these points in my weekly devotional, Winning Ways. You should, too.
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