Quotes from Andy Crouch

Hope for a life beyond this life, and a world of shalom beyond this world of injustice, is the greatest resource for the work of justice here and now. Christian hope for a world made new is not an alternative to doing justice—it is the most essential resource for it.

Work is the fruitful transformation of the world through human effort and skill, in ways that serve our shared human needs and give glory to God.

We are meant not just for thin, virtual connections but for visceral, real connections to one another in this fleeting, temporary, and infinitely beautiful and worthwhile life.

Nothing is gained and much is lost when a life spirals into idolatry—no matter how much creative image bearing may also be preserved by the mysterious workings of common grace. Had Jobs been able to turn from his more extreme forms of god playing, his life might have yielded much more, not less, lasting cultural fruit.

Lincoln's terrifying words did not apply to the Civil War itself, by the grace of God: If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

was never bound by the narrow expectations of others. But when we examine Jesus' changes of plans more closely, we discover an unmistakable pattern: Jesus' changes of plans almost always took him in the opposite direction of his own privilege. The purpose of every one of Jesus' improvisations was the restoration of image bearing in places where it had been lost. He exercised his power to interrupt in others' interests, never his own.

It is an almost precise inversion of Lord Acton's observation: the more power we have over our children, the more we are willing to sacrifice for them. Love transfigures power. Absolute love transfigures absolute power. And power transfigured by love is the power that made and saves the world.

So when we do sit down in front of a TV screen, it will be for a specific purpose and with a specific hope, not just of entertainment or distraction but of wonder and exploration. When we do scroll through social media, it will be to have a chance to give thanks for our friends, enjoy their creative gifts, and pray for their needs, rather than just something to take our mind off our tedium.

When we try to establish justice apart from worship of the true God, at best we will, as Jayakumar reminded me, simply replace one set of god players with another. What will never be addressed by these thin, secular conceptions of justice is the heart of the biblical understanding of justice: the restoration of the human capacity to bear the image in all its fullness.

I've come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

If culture is to change, it will be because some new tangible (or audible or visible or olfactory) thing is presented to a wide enough public that it begins to reshape their world.

Because make no mistake: the videos we put on for our kids—or the video games we pull up on our phones in our own moments of boredom—are designed, unconsciously or consciously, to produce a bewitching effect. And that effect is achieved by filling a screen with a level of vividness and velocity that does not exist in the real world—or only very rarely. Because it is rare, we instinctively respond to it, and indeed take delight in it.

As screens—movies, TV, video games—present a world far more colorful and energetic than the created world itself, they not only ratchet up our expectations for what is significant and entertaining; they also undermine our ability to enjoy what we could call the abundance of the ordinary.

you can't search for wisdom--at least, not online. And it's as rare and precious as ever--maybe, given how complex our lives have become, rarer and more precious than before.

The powerful have a hard time seeing their own power and its effects. We do not see when our exercise of power is cutting off life and possibility for others; we do not see the ways others are resisting or undermining our own power.

the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

Many evangelical tellings of the biblical story, especially those designed to deliver an evangelistic message, effectively began with Genesis 3: the fall of humanity. And they ended with Revelation 20: the casting of Satan and all his works into the lake of fire. Understood this way, the gospel runs an abbreviated gamut from original sin to final judgment. The original good creation and the glorious new creation are afterthoughts when they are mentioned at all.

Physical activity engages our brains in ways that mere thought or contemplation does not—indeed, there is reason to believe there is no such thing as "mere thought." All human thought requires embodiment, and without bodies we could not think. We can have a faint idea or hunch in our mind, but it is only when we speak or write it that it becomes clear, not just to others but to ourselves as well.

All real change starts with the number of people who can sit around a table in a single household

Is the result of cooperation the seizing of power? Not so: cooperation mysteriously creates more power than there was before, so that the more we work together the more power we discover is available to us.

Unchecked power, driven by self-interest, scarcity, grandiosity and aggression, is deadly to God's original fruitful purposes.

Boredom is actually a crucial warning sign—as important in its own way as physical pain. It's a sign that our capacity for wonder and delight, contemplation and attention, real play and fruitful work, has been dangerously depleted.

I rarely feel such clear signs of fatigue and anxiety on days that are filled with travel, meetings and assignments—only when I stop to rest. Without sabbath, I would be dangerously ignorant of the true condition of my soul.

It is surely not coincidental that all the earliest citations of the word bore in the Oxford English Dictionary—from the mid-eighteenth century—come from the correspondence of aristocrats and nobility.2 They did not have technology, but thanks to wealth and position they had a kind of easy everywhere of their own. The first people to be bored were the people who did not do manual work, who did not cook their own food, whose lives were served by others.