Church Math

Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation (Carol Howard Merritt)

“Church is like Noah’s ark,” a young widow explained to me. “People expect you to enter two-by-two.”

Follow Carol on twitter, you'll never regret it: @carolhoward

Obvious things....

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle)

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. "

The hardship of sermons

"There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons." - Anthony Trollope in chapter six of Barchester Towers

As soon as I read this several years ago I copied it down and sent it to my pastor. Someday I'd like to cross-stitch it onto a sampler to hang in her office. Brilliant!

Proof that I read non-fiction

...albeit not very often

Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Lynne Truss)

"We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. "

Charlotte Bartlett on Big Things

A Room With a View (E. M. Forster)

"Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. "

Who listens to sermons?

A Room With a View (E. M. Forster)

"She and Miss Bartlett are full of the praises of your sermon."

"My sermon?" cried Mr. Beebe. "Why ever did she listen to it?"

Why I won't ever finish The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove (Henry James)

"Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was still in the high florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool pavements took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played over the painted "subjects" in the splendid ceilings--medallions of purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of the air) and appreciated by the aid of ....."

Okay, I stopped typing. My fingers were getting tired. Now you know why I stopped reading this novel. Lovely story, too wordy for me: a person who loves words.