The Bible Heard, Sung, Spoken, and Taught

"In [corporate] worship, the congregation should listen to the word read, receiving it by ear. We can read with our eyes at home. We should sing the Scripture in Psalms and speak the Scriptures to one another in liturgical dialogue—rolling the word on our tongues. The pastor should teach the Bible—the Bible, not a review of the week's news or an anecdote from his personal life. The sermon isn't an occasion for a theological lecture. But it should be substantial, as solid as the congregation can handle. Pastors should aspire to offer solid food rather than skim milk, oatmeal stout rather than Bud Light (Leithart, The Theopolitan Vision, 30).

The Church's Gathering Under the Whole Counsel of God

"The church's liturgy should be Bible-saturated. There should be readings from Scripture, generous readings, not a few snippets from a lectionary or a few lines as a sermon text. The readings shouldn't skip the difficult or embarrassing parts—the tent pegs through the brains, the details about the impurity of menstruation, the severe things Jesus and Paul have to say about first-century Jews" (Leithart, The Theopolitan Vision, 29–30).

Disparities in Outcome and Getting at the Cause(s)

"The cause of a given outcome is an empirical question, whose answer requires untangling many complex factors, rather than simply pointing dramatically and indignantly to statistical disparities in outcomes, as so often happens in politics and in the media" (Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, 33).

Righteous and Unrighteous Anger

Baxter:

Anger is the rising up of the heart in passionate displacency against an apprehended evil, which would cross or hinder us of some desired good. It is given us by God for good, to stir us up to a vigorous resistance of those things, which, within us or without us, do oppose his glory or our salvation, or our own or our neighbor's real good. 

Anger is good when it is thus used to its appointed end, in a right manner and measure; but it is sinful, 1. When it riseth up against God or any good, as if it were evil to us. . . . 2. When it disturbs reason, and hindereth our judging of things aright. 3. When it casteth us into any unseemly carriage, or causeth or disposeth to any sinful words or action: when it inclineth us to wrong another by word or deed, and to do as we would not be done by. 4. When it is mistaken, and without just cause. 5. When it is greater in measure than the cause alloweth. 6. When it unfitteth us for our duty to God or man. 7. When it tendeth to the abatement of love and brotherly kindness, and the hindering of any good which we should do for others: much more when it breedeth malice, and revenge, and contentions, and unpeaceableness in societies, oppression of inferiors, or dishonouring of superiors. 8. When it stayeth too long, and ceaseth not when its lawful work is done. 9. When it is selfish and carnal, stirred up upon the account of some carnal interest, and used but as a means to a selfish, carnal, sinful end: as to be angry with men only for crossing your pride, or profit, or sports, or any other fleshly will. In all these it is sinful.

—Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (vol. 1 in The Practical Works of Richard Baxter; Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 200), 284.

Dying for a Worldly Church

"Tragically, many sectors of the church have become so worldly that they too are hostile to the demands of Jesus. If you call the church to repentance, be prepared for the assaults. Don't take up the task unless you're prepared to die" (Leithart, The Theopolitan Vision, xvi).

The Scope of True Religion

"It may even come about that a man's most genuinely Christian actions fall entirely outside that part of his life which he calls religious" (C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 25).