Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read

A batch of the best highlights from what Joshua's read, .

Limits are where freedom is found. We don’t need unlimited choices; that actually limits our ability to choose well. We need a limit on our choices, which actually empowers us to choose well. By limiting stories to a certain number of hours in a week, you introduce the ability to choose them well.

The Common Rule

Justin Whitmel Earley

Moses in Deuteronomy says to rest: Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. (5:15) Remember the exodus! Remember that the coercive system of Pharaoh was disrupted. Remember that the brick quota was declared null and void. Moses warned the Israelites: if you forget this, you will give your life over to coercive competition. But if you remember, you will know that Pharaoh and all like agents of coercion have been defeated. You do not need to meet expectations of your mother or your work or your boss or your broker or anybody else. You are free from the quota . . . if you remember, if you situate yourself in the covenant memory.

Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition With Study Guide

Walter Brueggemann

And if God’s good creation—of the world, of life as we know it, of our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams—really is good, and if God wants to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last, then to see the death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the (essentially non-Christian and non-Jewish) thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter!

Surprised by Hope

N. T. Wright

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