Seen on a friend's Facebook page:

To live a truly creative life, we must first lose the fear of being wrong - Joseph Chilton Pierce.

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"These are the 'advantages' to being poor.

1. The poor know they are in urgent need of redemption

2. The poor know not only their dependence on God, and on powerful people, but also their interdependence with one another

3. The poor rest their security not on things but on people

4. The poor have no exaggerated sense of their own importance, and no exaggerated need of privacy

5. The poor expect little from competition and much from co-operation

6. The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxuries

7. The poor can wait, because they have acquired a kind of dogged patience, born of acknowledged dependence.

8. The fears of the poor are more realistic and less exaggerated, because they already know that one can survive great suffering and want.

9. When the poor have the gospel preached to them, it sounds like good news, and not like a threat or a scolding

10. The poor can respond to the call of the gospel with a certain abandonment and uncomplicated totality because they have so little to lose, and are ready for anything."

Monika Hellwig (care of Philip Yancey)

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"No more Mr. Nice Gaius!" - Gaius Baltar

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"The problem with trucks is they breed debt: fuel, repairs, storage etc. Horses however, breed more horses". - Neville LeGreen quoting an Amish quote

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A [truly] Christian perspective on contemporary policy debates may not prevail. It must nonetheless be argued. And once heard, it must be weighed, together with other arguments from different philosophical traditions, in a fully contestable secular polity.

A Christian perspective, informed by a social gospel or Christian socialist tradition, should not be rejected contemptuously by secular politicians as if these views are an unwelcome intrusion into the political sphere.

If the churches are barred from participating in the great debates about the values that ultimately underpin our society, our economy and our polity, then we have reached a very strange place indeed.

--- Kevin Rudd