Sexual Sin

What good Christians don't realize is that sexual sin is not recreational sex gone overboard. Sexual sin is predatory. It won't be "healed" by redeeming the context or the genders. Sexual sin must simply be killed. What is left of your sexuality after this annihilation is up to God. But healing, to the sexual sinner, is death: nothing more and nothing less...Christians act as though marriage redeems sin. Marriage does not redeem sin. Only Jesus himself can do that.

-Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, 83.

Fairer than Florence

If men loved Pimlico, as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

-G. K. Chesterton, quoted by Joey Pensak in a recent newsletter

Flowers

Flowers growing out of your desert
Flowers out of parched ground
Flowers coming right up through the cracks
Of the pavement in this old town
Flowering's not a science
It's more like a fine art
Flowers coming right up through the cracks
Of our beat-down,
Burdened,
Broken,
Bruised,
Bloody,
Bastardized,
Besotted,
Bespotted,
Bamboozled,
Little hearts

-Bill Mallonee

Redemption in Creation

And so, when Scripture declares, God said, “Let there be...,” we may understand this as an immaterial utterance of God in His eternal Word, as the Word recalls His imperfect creature to Himself, so that it may not be formless but may be formed according to the various works of creation which He produces in due order.

-Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book 1, Chapter 4, Paragraph 9.