Alan Jacobs, quoted in the same report:

Very few churches overall are really interested in Christian formation. They know that if they demand a level of Christian formation of people, if they demand spiritual disciplines from them, if they demand serious study from them… they’re afraid that if they do that then the people will not be entertained and will go somewhere where they are entertained and where they are affirmed and where they’re not asked to think hard thoughts and practice difficult disciplines.

Mark Noll, quoted in the “Faith and Healthy Democracy” report with these surprising words (though perhaps they shouldn’t be):

I do not think that Christian believers, particularly in a large culturally pluralistic society, should ever expect to have Christian unity on public policy. Christian values need to be expressed and worked out in life situations. Life situations are always colored by historical forces, cultural assumptions, social realities. And because historical forces, cultural values, and social realities are going to be different for different communities, Christian teaching by its plentitude is going to nurture in different ways communities that have these historical, cultural, and social differences.

Andrew Koperski, in reviewing some historical inaccuracies in N. T. Wright and Michael Bird’s Jesus and the Powers, makes this important concluding point about the social activism—or lack thereof—of the apostle Paul (and, by extension, the earliest Christians):

Paul’s social and moral reasoning is…firmly in friction with how modern democracies and contemporary media acculturate us to think about pressing moral questions, namely, at a huge and impersonal scale. If Caesar wields sword and scepter, it seems to me that the Church itself is directly called to be something much subtler: salt.

(from the CD booklet for i,i)

(from the CD booklet for i,i)

Currently Listening: i,i by Bon Iver