legalism

He fetishized limits.

Security is by far the city's predominant business.

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

I can turn every "is" into "ought ".

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

C.S. Lewis had come to demand of his nightly prayers a "realization," "a certain vividness of the imagination and the affectations" _ a sure recipe for sleeplessness and misery.

According to Aquinas, effort may not be the best measure of our virtue.

Religion to me almost like when God leaves _ and people devise a set of rules to fill in the space.

Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it.

with the police doing all the killing, who do we call when our hero's are the villain

A sure way to have someone crushed by their doubt is to preach a sermon on how to remove your doubt.

I listened to make sure I was meeting the minimum requirement to stay out of jail, so to speak.

(Pastor Chuck) Smith told his elders in no uncertain terms that if the church had to turn away young people because of bare feet and clothes that they would be better off ripping up the carpet and replacing the pews with steel folding chairs.

Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law...

This is so whether the said body of citizens or its prevailing part does this directly of itself, or commits the task to another or others who are not and cannot be the legislator in an unqualified sense but only in a certain respect and at a certain time and in accordance with the authority of the primary legislator. And in consequence of this I say that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive their necessary approval from the same primary authority and no other: whatever may be the situation concerning various ceremonies or solemnities, which are not required for the results of an election to stand but for their good standing, and even without which the election would be no less valid. I say further that it is by the same authority that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive any addition or subtraction or even total overhaul, any interpretation and any suspension: depending on the demands of time and place and other circumstances that might make one of these measures opportune for the sake of the common advantage in such matters.

Although he didn't care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).

We have invented a moral sense which is rotting now that we can't give it employment, and when a moral sense begins to rot, it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavors which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my precious civilization was, contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.

People will do the basest things on account of their so-called honor.