The negative ethic forbids certain actions; the positive ethic demands certain actions. To follow the negative ethic is to be decent, to have clean hands. But to follow the positive ethic, to be one’s brother’s keeper, is to be more than decent—it is to be active, even aggressive. If the negative ethic is one of decency, the positive one is the ethic of riskful, strenuous nobility.

Philip Hallie

Once we grasp the truth that how God saves us is fitted to what we are called to be and to do, we can understand why it is that our salvation is necessarily both gift and charge.

Chris E. W. Green

Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved.

Synecdoche, New York (2008) Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman

Why is everyone so angry?

I’ve spent the better part of a year asking myself this question. I looked high and low; if I’m truly honest, I’d have to change it slightly to become more accurate.

Why am I so angry?

My life is full of convenience. It is full of transaction, at its best a mutually beneficial exchange of value, a kind of arm’s-length benign use of one another for our own ends. But it is not full of contemplation. It is often efficient. But it is lonely.

— Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For