We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Quotes to Chew On: Desires

The wishing apple.

Marcos de Madariaga via Compfight

Here’s a quote that comes to us via Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

“We are rarely presented with an authentically fulfilling trajectory for our desires… If we are created for infinite satisfaction, we really only have three choices about what to do with our desire in this life: We will become either a stoic, an addict, or a mystic. The stoic squelches desire out of fear, while the addict attempts to satisfy his desire for infinity with finite things, which, of course, can’t satisfy. That’s why the addict wants more and more and more. The mystic, on the other hand — in the Christian sense of the term — is the one who is learning how to direct his desire forinfinity toward infinity,”

– Christopher WestFill These Hearts.

Related Reading

Storming the Gates of Hell

Jesus said: “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Mt 16:18) To understand Jesus’ teaching here, there are a few things you should know. First, “Hades” was the standard term for the underworld, which means that Jesus was probably referring to the whole of the Satanic kingdom.…

Shouldn’t preachers rally Christians to fight political injustice?

Question: My pastor has publicly supported your book The Myth of a Christian Nation. But he’s recently called on the church to take a stand against the injustice of our local government cutting funding for inner city recreational facilities. This seems right to me, since we’re suppose to defend the cause of the poor and oppressed.…

Christians & Politics: Where Do You Stand?

In the 1980’s, Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson were leaders in the Moral Majority, a conservative evangelical social and political movement that attempted to rally “moral” people to change public policy. The movement died out in the 1990s. In 1999, Thomas and Dobson wrote a book entitled Blinded by Might in which they declare that…

The Politics of Jesus, Part 2

Even in the midst of politically-troubled times, we are called to preserve the radical uniqueness of the kingdom. This, after all, is what Jesus did as he engaged the first century world with a different kind of politics (see post). To appreciate the importance of preserving this distinction, we need to understand that the Jewish…

A Brief Theology of Faith

It is often argued that Hebrews 11:1 provides us with a clear definition of faith. The NIV translates it as, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Most of the times when we use different translations of the Bible, the differences between them are about…

Living With a Kingdom Consciousness

What Is the Kingdom of God? I want to begin by asking, “What is the kingdom of God?” This may seem like a rather obvious question. We all know what the Kingdom of God is, right? But see, this is precisely the problem. It’s why (I shall argue) the Kingdom of God is largely absent…