"I believe in a God who not only intervenes in human affairs--again and again--but one who also makes banquets out of stale bread."
- Karen Swallow Prior
"Besides, we were fifteen, and we couldn't get our feelings to match up with our brains. So we went with our feelings."
"From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me."
"A useful education served women best, More thought. To ‘learn how to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to a woman.’ Yet, when beauty is all th..."
"…the traditional family structure that More supported in her writings enabled women to 'be intelligent, rational, virtuous, and noble creatures, capable of great intellectual and moral achievements. T..."
"Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the bri..."
"…evangelicals were instrumental in advancing the ideal of companionate marriage, one built on shared faith and mutual affection, a revolutionary notion in an era in which forced marriages were a not-s..."
"…mischief, …arises not from our living in the world, but from the world living in us; occupying our hearts, and monopolizing our affections."
"What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul."
"The topic was eloquence, something Christians had been conflicted about since the first-century church when Paul wrote that in bringing the gospel, he did not come with “eloquence.” A few centuries la..."