About this blog

His memberships in the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Book Critics Circle are for real.

His interviews — with Dan Akroyd, P.J. O’Rourke, Pat Buchanan, former S.C. Governor Jim Hodges, Peter Augustine Lawler, and the late founder of Hooters, Bob Brooks — really happened.

He has the same birthday as John Coltrane, Bruce Springsteen, and Walter Lippman.

But none of this gives an accurate picture.

The fact is, Colin Foote Burch is a mess.

He writes this blog, and wrongs this blog, because he has been in various screwed up Christian circles all his life. As a child, he survived communal living with authoritarian neo-Pentecostal types. He lived through, and rebelled through, a high school operated by Independent Missionary Baptists. In adulthood, he got sucked into the Willow Creek movement — until he couldn’t keep up with all the how-to-fix-your-life steps in the sermons. Later, he was part of a congregation of dispensationalists led by a Reformed psychologist. Not one to break a tradition, Colin continues to participate in nutty religious groups today as a member of The Episcopal Church USA.

Along the way, a few interesting things happened. He was, for a couple of semesters, a small-group leader for N.C. State’s chapter of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. He attended Summit Ministries , the right-wing yet philosophically grounded worldview camp in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Later, he largely accepted Doug Bandow’s case for Christians holding a politically libertarian stance. He also made two trips to the Greatham, England, branch of L’Abri Fellowship, which he largely credits for salvaging his faith and introducing him, indirectly, to good beer.

Colin is a slow reader, but he still got to the end of Goodnight, Moon before his daughters fell asleep. He also spent 10 years in the newspaper business, which was just as abusive as the neo-Pentecostal commune. Colin once owned a coffeehouse with his wife; he was solely responsible for one-third of the U.S. coffee consumption from 2001 to 2003. Today, he is an adjunct English instructor at Coastal Carolina University and the Weekly Surge’s Beerman columnist, an identity he hides from his Baptist friends.

He is also a member of the Vestry at Trinity Episcopal Church, another identity he hides from his Baptist friends.

After some trying years, he decided he likes life, along with liberty, liturgy, literature, and culture, so he has begun compiling a list of quotations that might (but probably won’t) expand your understanding of stuff. This is only possible because Colin has not contributed a single quote to the list; he’s totally relying on the smart people.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love. -Hans Urs von Balthasar

If I had any indictment to make of the magisterial Reformation, it would be that it qualifies the one most crucial thing about Christianity, namely, that it is a religion of love. It tends to displace the centrality of love in favor of themes of trust and hope, even if Luther is far more guilty in this regard than Calvin. And in many ways, this is the gravest imaginable heresy. -from “Alternative Protestantism,” by John Milbank, in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, edited by James K.A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Baker Academic, 2005)

[I]f the New Testament is right, Christ did not come to pluck souls from an evil and worthless creation and transport them to an angelic existence; instead he came to announce the beginning of the world’s renewal. – Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman, The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education

We should love God eternally with our whole hearts, yet not so as to compromise or diminish our earthly affections, but as a kind of cantus firmus to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint. Earthly affection is one of these contrapuntal themes, a theme which enjoys autonomy of its own. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights then all true and edifying writings, whether in Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired. — C.S. Lewis, letter to Clyde S. Kilby, May 7, 1959

The natural order of religious belief is not usually to form propositional beliefs first and only later to engage in the faith life of a community. If we disengaged ourselves from the practice of faith in order to “find out” if it is justified, there is very little chance that we will ever find out. –Linda Zagzebski, in Philosophers Who Believe

In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive. – C.S. Lewis, in his essay “On Stories”

To [artist William] Schickel, there is an important difference between being a conservative and being a reactionary. The conservative, he believes, must find a language in which to make timeless truths understood in the present. The reactionary, on the other hand, clings to an old language from which the spirit has fled. – Gregory Wolfe, Sacred Passion: The Art of William Schickel

Because it is a reversal of Adam’s decision to die, the resurrection of Christ is a new affirmation of God’s first decision that Adam should live, an affirmation that goes beyond and transforms the initial gift of life…. From the resurrection we look not only back to the created order which is vindicated but forwards to our eschatological participation in that order. — Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order

Knowledge does not have to be conscious. It is incredible how much the aura of a country can penetrate to a child. Stronger than thought is an image – of dry leaves on a path, of twilight, of a heavy sky. – Czeslaw Milosz, Native Realm

Paul has been described as a ‘man of three cultures’ taking into account his Jewish origin, Greek language, and his prerogative of ‘civis romanus,’ as attested also by his name of Latin origin. – Benedict XVI, July 2, 2008

The clarity and cogency that philosophy brings is accordingly something that has a potentially positive role to play in every impartial area of human endeavor, Christianity by no means excluded. No church can exist in easy comfort with its intellectuals and theologians, but no church can be a thriving concern among thinking people if it dispenses with their services. — Nicholas Rescher, in Philosophers Who Believe

Philosophy makes us yearn for the truth, but it does not always show us how to find it. –Linda Zagzebski, in Philosophers Who Believe

For Socrates philosophy was a way of life, and he existed in that way. Since he did not profess to have any theory of philosophy, he did not accept pay as a professor. He could teach only by example, and what Kierkegaard learned from the example of Socrates became fundamental for his own thinking: namely, that existence and a theory about existence are not one in the same, any more than a printed menu is as effective a form of nourishment as an actual meal. More than that: the possession of a theory about existence may intoxicate the possessor to such a degree that he forgets the need of existence altogether. – William Barrett, Irrational Man

Leonard Bernstein tells me more than the dictionary when he says that for him music is cosmos in chaos. That has the ring of truth in my ears, and sparks my creative imagination. And it is true not only of music; all art is cosmos, cosmos found within chaos. At least all Christian art (by which I mean all true art, and I’ll go deeper into this later) is cosmos in chaos. There’s some modern art, in all disciplines, which is not; some artists look at the world around them and see chaos, and instead of discovering cosmos, they reproduce chaos on canvas, in music, in words. As far as I can see, the reproduction of chaos is neither art, nor is it Christian. – Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

Opposition to the idea that science can be the fulfillment of metaphysics does not involve in any way opposition to science. If the objectives of metaphysics are spurious, then they cannot be fulfilled by science any more than they can be by metaphysics. – Jeff Coulter of Boston University and Wes Sharrock of the University of Manchester, Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology

I figured if I let go of my grip of this net of beliefs and hopes and constructions of God, I would fall clear out of existence into cold nothingness. I thought of an astronaut severed from the spacecraft. Of course, I’m still here. – Eileen Markey, writing in BustedHalo.com