In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him.

In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him.

I feel annoyed that in His wisdom, [God] chose to reel me in with middle-brow Christian fiction. It could be worse, I suppose. I could have come to faith while reading Left Behind.

I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

The Spirit is the reason we can build a church and have confidence that we will get it at least a little bit right.

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing.And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.

Scholars have endlessly written about antebellum Protestant thinking about slavery. Now, finally, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon turns a spotlight on a new, crucial question: how did antebellum Protestants parse capitalism? For anyone who seeks to understand the political economy of the antebellum era-or, indeed, the complex entanglement of Christianity and capitalism today-this book is critical. I, for one, am very grateful to Stewart Davenport for having written it.