Heart + Mind Resources

We hope you’re enjoying our Heart + Mind Pattern. Below you’ll find resources that have informed our conversation so far or will take you further into the topic. We will be adding to this list as we continue the Pattern. If you’d like to catch up on the past weeks, use the links below…

Books

Articles

Quotes

“Christ emptied Himself. Behold our pattern.”
— St. Ambrose

“Today we automatically position him away from (or even in opposition to) the intellect and intellectual life. Almost no one would consider him to be a thinker... For lack of an appropriate understanding of Jesus we come to do our work in intellectual, scholarly and artistic fields on our own. We do not have confidence (otherwise known as faith) that he can be our leader and teacher in matters we spend most of our time working on. Thus our efforts often fall far short of what they should accomplish, and may even have less effect than the efforts of the Godless, because we undertake them only with "the arm of the flesh." Our faith in Jesus Christ rises no higher than that. We do not see him as he really is, maestro of all good things... You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don't think him competent.”
— Dallas Willard

“One of the more distrubing characteristics of this post-truth age is that people limit themselves to their own narrow communities, regarding connection or communication with other communities as signs of intellectual contamination or cultural degradation. We all too often live in self-reinforcing and self-referential intellectual and cultural bubbles, members of ”in-groups“ who demonize inferior ”out-groups,“ thus dividing the world into hereos and villains and unproblematically locating ourselves among the former. We read only ”approved“ newspapers and ”safe“ web postings from ”trusted“ authors, anxious to avoid any hint that we might recongize good or truth in others, which would invariably lead to a humiliating ejection from our favored ”in-group.“”
— Alister McGrath

“For Lewis, people are too easily taken in by the latest cultural and intellectual fashions. Wanting to be “up to date” in their thinking, they uncritically accept the latest ideas they read about in the media. Reading older books, Lewis argues, helps us to realise that “basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods.” We need to remember that the ideas we tend to regard as hopelessly old fashioned and out of date were once seen as cutting edge. What was once new and brilliant becomes old and stale. Perhaps Lewis seems a little too scathing when he declares that “much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.”[90] Yet his point is fair: much recent thought is fleeting, lacking the staying power to excite and inform later generations. So is Lewis saying that only old ideas are any good, and that new ideas are invariably wrong? No.[91] He is asking us to be critical. New ideas need to be looked at carefully. They may be good; they may be bad. But ideas are not automatically good because they are new. Similarly, many—but not all—old ideas have permanent value. They have proved themselves through the centuries, and will continue to be important in the future. We need to figure out which ideas and values are of lasting importance, and hold fast to them.”
— Alister McGrath

“One of the most striking things about the world is just how little it discloses to us about its true meaning. It is full of mystery—at its best, full of wonder; at its worst, full of terror. Making sense of the wonder and terror of the world is the original human preoccupation.”
— Andy Crouch

“The language of “seeing” reality calls into question the adequacy of simply “thinking about” our world. Christian discipleship is imaginative, not simply rational, demanding expansion of the capacity of all our faculties—reason, imagination, and emotions—to accommodate the rich and overwhelming vision of God set out in the New Testament and enacted in the worship and proclamation of the church. This imaginatively compelling and intellectually enriching vision of reality is mediated by the community of faith.“
— Alister McGrath

“Jesus' aim in utilizing logic is not to win battles, but to achieve understanding or insight in his hearers. This understanding only comes from the inside, from the understandings one already has. It seems to "well up from within" one. Thus he does not follow the logical method one often sees in Plato's dialogues, or the method that characterizes most teaching and writing today. That is, he does not try to make everything so explicit that the conclusion is forced down the throat of the hearer. Rather, he presents matters in such a way that those who wish to know can find their way to, can come to, the appropriate conclusion as something they have discovered—whether or not it is something they particularly care for.“
— Willard

“Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more to life than this. It doesn’t contradict reason but transcends it.”
— Alister McGrath

Brandon Cole