“The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.”

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.

The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth.

Then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

That He can plan His will through our actions, that He can direct His strategy of world evangelization through His Church.

Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people’s perception of the gospel.

The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God’s eternal purposes for his world.

They’re just regular people who live in small towns. They grow up and try to raise families and have a job and go to church and play softball. It’s that way everywhere.

Pull out the stopper! Let’s have a whopper! / But get me to the church on time!.

I grew up in the church, with traditional hymns, but at the same time I was beginning to listen to pop music, the mid-60s.