Quotes from Os Guinness

The despicable modern resort to playing the victim card or charging one's opponent with being "phobic" in one way or another was not for Paul. If

Money rather than monarchy and plutocracy rather than theocracy are the chief threats to republicanism today.

the modern world has scrambled things so badly that today we worship our work, we work at our play, and we play at our worship.

The Spirit of Liberty" is not to be found in courts, laws and constitutions alone. "Liberty lives in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to save it. While it lives there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it."" The

The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, "Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can do without?"4

Much of the greatness of the human spirit can be seen in our passionate pursuit of knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, perfection, and love. At the same time, few things are so haunting as the stories of the very greatest seekers falling short. Leonardo da Vinci's magnificent failures point to a very personal entry point to the wonder of calling - when something more than human seeking is needed if seeking is to be satisfied, then calling means that seekers themselves are sought.

Our task is to focus on our individual callings in engaging with the world, to trust that others are following theirs too, and to leave to God the masterminding of the grand outcome.

For at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots—the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.

The inner, the real and the unseen are irrelevant in today's world. All that counts is appearance, and the world of consumerism has lost no time in catering to every need, and then creating even more, in this burgeoning market of the appearance.

the multiple angry assaults on the "traditional family" are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the "covenantal family" of the Bible into the hated "hierarchical family" of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others. Still

The indissoluble link between prideful self-love, aversion to truth, self-deception and hypocrisy is one of the great themes of the Bible—for example, the drumbeat repetition that "the way of a fool is right in his own eyes" (Prov 12:15). Sinful minds therefore claim both self-rightness in terms of truth and self-righteousness in terms of goodness.

Name-calling, insult, ridicule, guilt by association, caricature, innuendo, accusation, denunciation, negative ads, and deceptive and manipulative videos have replaced deliberation and debate. Neither side talks to the other side, only about them; and there is no pretence of democratic engagement, let alone a serious effort at persuasion.

We must also and always be discerning about the spirit of the age in any generation, which today means squarely facing the seductions of technique.

But the fact is that the Bible itself is the grandest of grand stories, yet it prizes truth and reason without being modernist, and it prizes countless stories within its overall story without being postmodern either. In short, the Bible is both rational and experiential, propositional as well as relational, so that genuinely biblical arguments work in any age and with any person.

There are no foolproof methods of persuasion, and those that come closest are coercive and dangerous because they override the will rather than convince the mind.

The modern world is highly secular in certain parts, and nowhere more than in the world of the educated elites. Such people are notoriously "tone deaf" and their natural habitat is "a world without windows," as Weber and Berger have described them.

Behind every civilization lies a vision and a worldview, and none is greater or more lasting than the strength of its vision.

The Christian faith is not true because it works. It works because it is true.

It is heaven that rules.

Either we serve the unconditional / Or some Hitlerian monster will supply / An iron convention to do evil by.

As followers of Jesus, we must not duck the enormity of a simple but shattering fact: with relatively few exceptions, such as some branches of Buddhism, almost all the most militantly secularist societies in history have been the product of Christian societies. The church is a leading spawning ground for atheists.

God is his own best apologist.

René Dubois, "Piensa globalmente, actúa localmente"

Under the impact of the modern world, there has been a definite melting down of the assurance of faith. Secularization makes the Christian faith seem less real, privatization makes it seem merely a private preference, and pluralization makes it seem just one among many.