Quotes from Sarah Arthur

The basic principles of logic dictate that a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time... and that a statement must be either true or false... Lucy is lying, or she is crazy, or she is telling the truth. She can't be some combination, and she can't be none of those things... The laws of logic dictate that she must be one of them... Notice how practical common sense about the suposed impossibility of other worlds doesn't come into the equation.

The lesson is this: When the road gets dark and all hope seems lost, there's nothing to do but keep going. We, like Bilbo, must keep up our "hobbitry in heart." Even more important, as people of faith, we recognize that we are not alone. Whatever happens from this point on, we put our trust in God. And we go on.

The radical call of faith is not to insist upon a set of universal principles about right and wrong, but to offer an alternative story by which lives can be shaped into new instincts, new practices, new ways of speaking and being in the world. We want our teens to make a decision consistent with the better story of which they are a part, a decision that doesn't even feel like a decision but a script they know by heart.

Of the Father's love begotten, Ere the worlds began to be, He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He, Of the things that are, That have been, And that future years shall see, Evermore and evermore! —Translated from a poem by AURELIUS PRUDENTIUS (Roman, ca. AD 348–415)4

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells. —FLANNERY O'CONNOR9

Enter Madeleine. Here was a Christian author who could function quite unperturbedly from inside paradox, who dared to question the assumption that all things must be either/or. Why can't it be both/and? What is this nonsense about "secular"? Why can't God use those things if God wants to? Why can't God speak through this or that person (if God can speak through a donkey, for instance)? Who says?

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. Walking on Water

The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.

To the God-hungry imagination, the fallen world is a crummy place much of the time; we rightly long for the land at the back of the wardrobe, the kingdom east of the sun and west of the moon.

As I look back on my seven years in full-time youth ministry, the experiences that were the most formative for youth weren't the ones that required the largest sound systems or the most persuasive Christian apologetics, but the ones that made the strongest imaginative connections.

from a Wesleyan perspective, we can easily see how the imagination is one of the ways the Holy Spirit works preveniently in our lives—before we're even aware of God's presence.

Writes Webber: This conflict of style has continued in the twentieth-century debate about traditional versus contemporary worship. Traditional worship seems to be hanging on to modernity while contemporary worship has capitulated to pop culture. In either case the debate continues to rage about style with little concern for a biblical theology of worship. 8

liturgy is not a particular style of worship or some outmoded preference on the part of old people; it's a timeless pattern based on the fourfold movement—one that was originally created by first-rate storytellers who knew what they were about.

In partnership with playfulness, the imagination gives us the ability to find and make purposeful patterns and even plotlines: in other words, the ability to find and make meaning.