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What Does it Mean to Write Well? | David Foster Wallace

“In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader — even though it’s mediated by a kind of text — there’s an electricity about it"

David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way, 25-26

The Life Long Cultivation of Soil (and People)

“Don’t treat your soil like dirt.

A field is like a reputation…it takes a lifetime to build a good one, and an instant to ruin it.”

 Pritchard, Gaining Ground

 

(HT: 1,001 Rules for My Unborn Son)

The Chief Ways We Experience Community?

In a fragmented society in which major institutions like the church and the community no longer play the same role of bringing people together, owning identical possessions becomes one of the chief ways in which we experience community, overcoming our pattern through shared patterns of consumption

Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, 75-6

The Most Essential Thing God Does in all of Human History

When I pray, I am not praying to a philosophically complicated absentee creator. When I manage to pay attention to the continual love song, I am not trying to envisage the impossible-to-imagine domain beyond the universe. I do not picture kings, thrones, crystal pavements, or any of the possible cosmological updatings of these things. I look across, not up; I look into the world, not out or away. When I pray I see a face, a human face among other human faces. It is a face in an angry crowd, a crowd engorged by the confidence that it is doing the right thing, that it is being virtuous. The man in the middle of the crowd does not look virtuous. He looks tired and frightened and battered by the passions around him. But he is the crowd's focus and centre. The centre of everything, in fact, because if you are a Christian you do not believe that the characteristic action of the God of everything is to mould the course of the universe powerfully from afar. For a Christian, the most essential thing does in time, in all of human history, is to be that man in the crowd; a man under arrest, and on his way to our common catastrophe.

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic (107-108)

Small Things, Done Consistently, in Strategic Places

In my experience, the greatest successes don’t come from grandiose scenarios of good intentions engendered by temporarily pumped-up motivation. Rather, the most lasting and significant positive effects result from small things, done consistently, in strategic places.

—David Allen

(source)

The Most Dangerous Thing the Church Can Do

"We may do well to recognize what seems to be the consistent thrust of the whole Bible—that unless and until, in faith, the future of the world becomes more important than the future of the church, the church has no future. As Jesus put it, the most dangerous thing you can do is seek to save your life . . ."

(Ralph Winter, Six Essential Components of World Evangelization)

The Size of My Post-It

If It Won't Fit on a Post-It (The 99 Percent)

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

The Beginning of Knowledge

"Of all things that are to be known this is most evident, that God is to be feared, to be reverenced, served, and worshipped; this is so the beginning of knowledge that those know nothing who do not know this"

Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible Vol III, 793

(quoted in Bradley's introduction to Buyon, A Treatise of the Fear of God)

"Unsafe" People and Explaining the Gospel to Our Children

"...without realizing it, parents like me are sometimes embarrassed by Jesus. Why would Jesus draw people like that to himself? It is hard for parents to remember that children in the crowds saw Jesus with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. Parents want to go into Jesus's presence at church in order to keep their kids safe from the world. But Jesus keeps drawing unsafe people from the world to himself. We are confounded. We complain, 'How am I supposed to explain this to my kids?' With that complaint we lose sight of something vital: To explain how Jesus reaches people no matter where they've been or what they've done is to explain to our kids the gospel. It is to explain our own testimony. It is to teach the next generation how Jesus relates to people and the world"

(Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World, 81)

What Preachers Avoid?

"Identify those areas of reality that a preacher does not talk about and you will discover those spheres of reality that people are daily trying to navigate without the light of God's Word"

(Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World, 30)