A few of my favourites:

• Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
• The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
• The miracle is that despite all of society’s promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.

Religious fundamentalism is the neurotic anxiety that without a Meaning of meanings, there is no meaning at all. It is simply the flip side of nihilism. Underlying this assumption is the house-of-cards view of life: flick away the one at the bottom, and the whole fragile structure comes fluttering down. Someone who thinks this way is simply the prisoner of a metaphor. In fact, a great many believers reject this view. No sensitive, intelligent religious believer imagines that non-believers are bound to be mired in total absurdity. Nor are they bound to believe that because there is a God, the meaning of life becomes luminously clear. On the contrary, some of those with religious faith believe that God’s presence makes the world more mysteriously unfathomable, not less. If he does have a purpose, it is remarkably impenetrable. God is not in that sense the answer to a problem. He tends to thicken things rather render them self-evident.

Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, 77.

The last part of that paragraph resonates perfectly with me. When I first became a Christian, I was utterly convinced that life now made perfect sense, and I knew what the meaning of (my) life was. I now see that, firstly, it would be difficult not to see more clearly after I ceased abusing enough drugs to fell an elephant. Secondly, my simple confidence in the meaning of life is no longer simple, but rather assailed with anxiety, doubt, and not a little fear. And this is because of my faith in God.

God seems to have delighted in turning my life upside down, not in just a supposedly instantaneous moment of salvation, but in a style more akin to a car crash that lasts for years and years. Any notion of stability is simply a reprieve from the tumult bound to break in at any second. I don’t know which way is up, and it’s all God’s fault.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

To say that witness is gift is to say that the gospel message is offered in the absence of any additional handles designed to guarantee its reception. The test of witness is not simply whether or not it is received in fact, but whether it is received as gift. The gift of good news is to be received “as it is” or “in its own right” and not by means of an additional vehicle or medium that might guarantee its successful passage. Because the gospel message is that of a peace that rejects the primacy of effectiveness, the message itself is the only available medium. Accordingly, Yoder claims that “the challenge to the faith community should not be to dilute or filter or translate its witness, so that the ‘public’ community can handle it without believing, but to so purify and clarify and exemplify it that the world can perceive it to be good news without having to learn a foreign language.”

Although Yoder emphasizes that the good news turns on being received by the listener, this is not to suggest that it is preoccupied with what people want to hear. Such an assumption would suggest that there is a sense in which the gift is known prior to its being received in such a way that it equally ceases to be a genuine gift. Rather than identifying underlying conditions or developing new strategies for the effective deliverance of the truth, the church is called to embody its otherness in a way that makes intelligible the truth of Christ for the world. To emphasize the missionary existence of the peace church is to suggest that it lives, not as instrument, but as example. The task of the church is thus not to Christianize the world, but to be the church.

Huebner, A Precarious Peace, 131

Make Something Day is a response to Adbuster’s famous Buy Nothing Day, which is itself a response to that high holy day of American consumerism called Black Thursday. Buy Nothing Day resists consumerism with buying nothing. The people behind Make Something Day have a better idea:

In response to the over-consumptive habits of western culture, Adbusters magazine has been promoting Buy Nothing Day for years now. The Friday after Thanksgiving in the U.S. is typically marked as the busiest shopping day for Americans. But we live in a world that can no longer handle our consumptive habits here in the west. And while we pile up on things we don’t need a large portion of the world exists without basic human needs being met every day. We applaud Buy Nothing Day… but it isn’t enough for us. We believe that giving is a central part of being human. So, we replaced the negative with something positive: Make Something Day. Go ahead and give gifts this holiday season. As they say, giving is better than receiving. But that doesn’t mean buying something is. So, we encourage folks to avoid shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Instead, stay home, put a log on the fire and try making something for someone. Don’t feel creative? Check out the different pages on our site, get inspired and share your stories with us!

This is, of course, not directly applicable to us Canadians — our Thanksgiving is two weeks behind us already — but I like the positive approach to resistance on display here. This is the kind of imagination we need so as not to merely resist the current system, but to start embodying an alternative.

Industrialism prescribes an economy that is placeless and displacing. It does not distinguish one place from another. It applies its methods and technologies indiscriminately in the American East and the American West, in the Unites States and India. It thus continues the economy of colonialism. The shift of colonial power from European monarchy to global corporation is perhaps the dominant theme of modern history. All along — from the European colonization of Africa, Asia, and the New World, to the domestic colonialism of American industries, to the colonization of the entire rural world by the global corporations — it has been the same story of the gathering of an exploitive economic power into the hands of a few people who are alien to the places and the people they exploit. Such an economy is bound to destroy locally adapted agrarian economies everywhere it goes, simply because it is too ignorant not to do so. And it has succeeded precisely to the extent that it has been able to inculcate the same ignorance in workers and consumers. A part of the function of industrial education is to preserve and protect this ignorance.

Berry, Citizenship Papers, 144-5.

There’s a lot of things that I could say, both positive and negative, about doing a day like this. I’m not going to bother.

What I will say is simply this: poverty exists, and it’s our fault. You can’t simply point a finger at someone else, or mutter something about “survival of the fittest.” The mere existence of poverty means that we live in a system where some people are better than others. The persistence of poverty means that we believe “it’s not my problem” or we might pronounce “they should get a job” while living and thriving off of a system designed to privilege a few off the backs of the many. I am guilty and implicated in all of this and, if you’re reading this, in all likelihood so are you.

The ways to deal with guilt are three: denial, self-justification and repentence. Most of what we hear about when it comes to poverty revolves around the first two strategies. Today, let us see repentence. Today, let us see action.

Today, let us see the image of God in the faces of poor people.

• Christ and Culture and Church and Creation - James K.A. Smith reviews D.A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited, and finds it lacking. A gem of a quote:
  

  One gets the sense that Carson’s eternity lacks cultural institutions —an eternity without commerce or politics, art, or athletics… All that will remain is “the church” (though it’s not clear just what the church will be doing since, according to Carson, “the church lives and dies by the Great Commission”).

• Between Sojourners and the Simple Way? Rethinking Radical, Evangelical Politics in ’08 with John Howard Yoder - If you’ve read Jim Wallis and/or Shane Claiborne, this is absolutely crucial reading for understanding how both fall somewhat short of the potent work of John Howard Yoder. I just about could have written this myself:
  

  Much of my thinking in these past two years has been about trying… to figure out why I’m uncomfortable, finally, with both Wallis’s Anabaptist ethics mediated through public reason and Claiborne’s personalist Christian anarchism. The person who has helped me to live most creatively in the tensions between Claiborne and Wallis is the late Mennonite theologian and ethicist John Howard Yoder.

EDIT: Smith has posted some remarks regarding his CT review of Carson on his blog, saying that “They asked me to be charitable and constructive; this was the best I could do I’m afraid. The book, to be honest, reads like sloppily connected lecture notes, meandering here and there… for anyone who is even remotely familiar with current discussions of “Christ and culture,” this book feels very, very provincial.”

As a measure of how far we have “progressed” in our industrial economy, let me quote a part of a sentence from the prayer, “For Every Man in His Work” from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer: “Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as thy servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men.” What is astonishing about that prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations are now divided, almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of working in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God’s servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people. This alone, I think, is sufficient to account for the orientation of most churches to religious feeling, increasingly feckless, as opposed to religious thought or religious behavior.

Berry, What Are People For?, 101

I have been surprised by the number of Christians who have given up on politics this year. “I don’t like either candidate, so I’m staying home,” some say.

I get fed up with the vain posturing and empty promises, too. But not voting is not an option—it’s both our civic and sacred duty. Voting is required of us as good citizens and as God’s agents for appointing leaders.

Voting Like It Matters | Christianity Today

Wow, voting is a sacred duty? That some form of government is divinely appointed is scriptural (Rom 13), but the notion that the modern nation-state is actually interested in any vaguely biblical notion of justice instead of self-serving power can only be reached by a willful ignorance of all of the evidence.

I agree with Colson that Christian apathy is to be lamented, but the notion that this is the only reason why we might forgo voting is to betray a distinct lack of biblically-informed imagination. Perhaps we might choose to avoid voting because, as Stanley Hauerwas is fond of saying: “Voting is violent. Where else do you see 51% of people able to force their will on the other 49%?”

Perhaps there are Christians who see in Jesus a profoundly engaged and political rejection of all forms of violence. Just maybe there are Christian reasons to imagine the nation-state to be fundamentally idolatrous and easier to identify (biblically speaking) with Babylon rather than the promised land. It’s because they haven’t given up on an engaged, loving politics that these Christians have given up on the farce that is national electoral voting.

That being said, I’m probably voting for the Green Party in the upcoming Canadian election, because they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning and they’re saying more that needs to be said than any other party. Besides, it helps me to not be tempted to hope in politicians, which I believe to implicit in our confession that Jesus is Lord.

If the word community is to mean or amount to anything, it must refer to a place (in its natural integrity) and its people. It must refer to a placed people. Since there obviously can be no cultural relationship that is uniform between a nation and a continent, “community” must mean a people locally placed and a people, moreover, not too numerous to have a common knowledge of themselves and of their place. Because places differ from one another and because people will differ somewhat according to the characters of their places, if we think of a nation as an assemblage of many communities, we are necessarily thinking of some sort of pluralism.

There is, in fact, a good deal of talk about pluralism these days, but most of it that I have seen is fashionable, superficial, and virtually worthless. It does not foresee or advocate a plurality of settled communities but is only a sort of indifferent charity toward a plurality of aggrieved groups and individuals. It attempts to deal liberally — that is, by the superficial courtesies of tolerance and egalitarianism — with a confusion of claims.

The social and cultural pluralism that some now see as a goal is a public of destroyed communities. Wherever it exists, it is the result of centuries of imperialism. The modern industrial urban centers are “pluralistic” because they are full of refugees from destroyed communities, destroyed community economies, disintegrated local cultures, and ruined local ecosystems. The pluralists who see this state of affairs as some sort of improvement or as the beginning of “global culture” are being historically perverse, as well as politically naive. They wish to regard liberally and tolerantly the diverse, sometimes competing claims and complaints of a rootless society, and yet they continue to tolerate also the ideals and goals of the industrialism that caused the uprooting. They affirm the pluralism of a society formed by the uprooting of cultures at the same time that they regard the fierce self-defense of still-rooted cultures as “fundamentalism,” for which they have no tolerance at all. They look with wistful indulgence and envy at the ruined or damaged American Indian cultures so long as those cultures remain passively a part of our plurality, forgetting that these cultures, too, were once “fundamentalist” in their self-defense. And when these cultures again attempt self-defense — when they again assert the inseparability of culture and place — they are opposed by this pluralistic society as self-righteously as ever. The tolerance of this sort of pluralism extends always to the uprooted and passive, never to the rooted and active.

Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 168-70.