John Mark Reynolds Quotes

#1. Some Christians believe the harder that one thinks, the colder faith will grow. Augustine grew more brilliant as he grew more pious, more creative as he became more orthodox. His period of heresy was imitative, but his traditional Christianity took mental risks.

John Mark Reynolds

#2. while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.

John Mark Reynolds

#3. For Aristotle, it's not enough simply to act in accordance with the reason once in a while. We must cultivate habits of virtue that develop into a firmly established moral character over a lifetime.

John Mark Reynolds

#4. Here (in Thomas Aquinas) is the mind that prepared the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here is the mind that was Catholic enough to embrace any good idea, from wherever it came.

John Mark Reynolds

#5. In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries.

John Mark Reynolds

#6. I cannot recognize Christianity in his (Nietzsche's) rants against the church, but I do recognize too much of myself.

John Mark Reynolds

#7. Plato understood love as a powerful engine that can destroy mankind or turn us to the good. Christ made that turn possible, and Spenser shows what can be done in the human soul if we take it.

John Mark Reynolds

#8. Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.

John Mark Reynolds

#9. Chaucer, like Homer, writes about a journey, but as a Christian he has a different goal. Homer wanted to go home, but Chaucer's pilgrims want a place of man's true home: paradise

John Mark Reynolds

#10. What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.

John Mark Reynolds

#11. God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop.

John Mark Reynolds

#12. Erasmus's Bible-saturated mind. His was a mind too broad for fundamentalism, which rejects reason, and too honest for intellectualism, which rejects revelation.

John Mark Reynolds

#13. If Christianity is true, then every argument will, if pursued to the end, lead to Jesus.

John Mark Reynolds

#14. Ideas after Aristotle multiplied but did not progress.

John Mark Reynolds

#15. Try to get inside the world of Homer and see what it would be like to think with his view of reality. Only then can you begin to judge it, because only then do you really understand it.

John Mark Reynolds

#16. It has never been easier to get books but never harder to find the quiet needed to study them.

John Mark Reynolds

#17. Growing up loving the Bible made me apt to love other books. I don't love them in the same way I love the Bible, but a lesser love came easily. The splendor of sunlight does not take away

John Mark Reynolds

#18. A culture will tolerate criticism of its idols only when the criticism is made by those who worship the idols.

John Mark Reynolds

#19. Ask a conventional person for an answer, and you are likely to get it; ask for a reason for his answer, and you are likely to get a punch in the mouth.

John Mark Reynolds

#20. It is not that one has to have exhaustive knowledge of love to live, but it would be much better if one had it.

John Mark Reynolds

#21. The Romans were a strong power before Virgil, but the Greeks had captured their imaginations. While Rome conquered physical Greece, Greek mythology had enveloped Rome. The Empire coul be confident in itself until a Roman poet matched Homer and harmonized Greek civilization with Roman ideals

John Mark Reynolds

#22. By reading older books we get a taste of the conversation of Heaven.

John Mark Reynolds

#23. The fundamentalist burns with anti-intellectual zeal, and in reaction sophists are often swollen up with intellectualism. The fundamentalist and the sophist justify their excesses by the sin of their opposite. Fundamentalism and sophistry give piety and philosophy bad reputations with society.

John Mark Reynolds