Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read

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

That’s why mission is the work of the whole church, the whole time.

Surprised by Hope

N. T. Wright

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger. (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature [New York: Harvest, 2002], 56)

Desiring the Kingdom

James K. A. Smith

For other religious movements of the day, such as Mithraism or the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus, for example, there are the remains of numerous shrines and dedicatory inscriptions but no texts.46 For early Christianity, however, there are no known church structures or inscriptions prior to sometime in the third century AD, but there is this huge catalogue of texts. This is yet another indication that early Christianity was different from at least most other religious groups of the time.

Destroyer of the Gods

Larry W. Hurtado

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