Quotes from Christian Smith

Rather than leaving generous people on the short end of an unequal bargain, practices of generosity are actually likely instead to provide generous givers with essential goods in life—happiness, health, and purpose—which money and time themselves simply cannot buy. That is an empirical fact well worth knowing.

generosity involved in proactively forgiving other people. This form of generosity, and the positive feelings it evokes in generous forgivers, have been shown by studies to reduce stress, tension, and sadness, and to lead to lower heart rates, lower skin conduction levels, and lower blood pressure. By contrast, those who ungenerously hold grudges are more angry, feel less in control of their lives, and, partly as a result, exhibit symptoms of unhealthy physical conditions.

Reality has a deep dimension often operating below the surface of empirical experience. To think otherwise is to commit what critical realists call the epistemic fallacy, namely, to reduce what is to what we can empirically observe. That is a debilitating move.

Capitalism is not merely a system for the efficient production and distribution of goods and services; it also incarnates and promotes a particular moral order , an institutionalized normative worldview comprising and fostering particular assumptions, narratives, commitments, beliefs, values, and goals.

Although all things with physical substance are real, not all real things have physical substance.

The evangelical Old Testament biblical scholar Christopher Wright states the matter even more strongly: "We are listening, not to a single voice, not even to a single choir in harmony, but to several choirs singing different songs with some protest groups jamming in the wings."[113]

Persons in their most developed form are conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending centers of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who—as the efficient cause of their own responsible actions and interactions—exercise complex capacities for agency and inter-subjectivity in order to sustain their own incommunicable selves in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the non-personal world.

to Tocqueville, and reiterated by Robert Bellah and collaborators in their landmark study of American life Habits of the Heart, this pursuit of what one does not have makes it difficult for people to form bonds with one another. Their minds "are more anxious and on edge." Because "they clutch everything," they can "hold nothing fast.

The Reformation thus does not call for celebration. It calls for sorrow, repentance, and reconciliation.

Peter Enns is correct: "We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe."[164]

What holds scripture together is not simply accurate information or inerrant propositions about God, life, and the world. What holds it together is the reality of Christ himself, the living, eternal Son through whom God reconciles the world to himself in love.

Some sacred projects are so doggedly committed to advancing their particular, packaged views of believed orthodoxies that they can become blinded to good evidence that problematizes their truth-packages and intolerant of other people whom they believe impede their sacred missions.

We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us." Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Most biblicists carry on with unperturbed confidence in biblicist assumptions and beliefs, paying little attention to the ramifications of multiple counterclaims about rival biblical teachings. Why and how can this be? The answers are multiple, and I can offer only conjectures about some of the possibilities here.

In forty-nine years of churchgoing, I have never heard a sermon preached on this passage. And for good reason. It reads almost like a tasteless, private email message that was mistakenly forwarded by the recipient to readers who were not meant to see

variety of kinds of practices of generosity are positively and significantly associated with five important good life outcomes. Giving money, volunteering, being relationally generous, being a generous neighbor and friend, and personally valuing the importance of being a generous person are all significantly, positively correlated with greater personal happiness, physical health, a stronger sense of purpose in life, avoidance of symptoms of depression, and a greater interest in personal growth.

How much stronger and healthier might the Body of Christ be if it was not torn into pieces? How powerful and vibrant could the Church become if in unity all of today's separated evangelicals and other Protestants brought together in it all of their gifts, talents, energies, and devotion? We are so used to division that that is almost unimaginable.

scripture. Yet a bit of reflection on orthodox Christian theology makes clear that numerous absolutely crucial doctrinal terms are not themselves found in the Bible but were invented or appropriated by the church during the patristic era.

In sum, the Bible itself does not lay out the full biblicist program or anything like it. The Bible contains passages showing, for example, a reader of scripture unable to understand what it teaches unless someone guides him (Acts 8:30–31).

Biblicism, I have said, is impossible. But there are other approaches—including outright liberalism—that I think are even worse.

seeing Christ as central compels us to always try to make sense of everything we read in any part of scripture in light of our larger knowledge of who God is in Jesus Christ.

To put it bluntly, it is not the words of the Bible that are 'the way, the truth, and the life.' It is the person of Christ, to whom the Bible witnesses."[168]

not far beneath the surface appearance of happy, liberated emerging adult sexual adventure and pleasure lies a world of hurt, insecurity, confusion, inequality, shame, and regret.

Latria (adoration) is the worship and homage that is rightly given only to God. Dulia (veneration, devotion), by contrast, is the recognition and honor rightly evoked by excellence observed in created persons.