"Viewers don't expect male protagonists like Don Draper or Walter White’s story arcs to be solely propelled by their love lives. Why should it be different for Alicia Florrick?"

"So Dad, if you won't pay gays at World Vision to feed starving children, why do you pay gays at the grocery store to feed yourself?"

"Sometimes, after the iceberg or the explosion, the lifeboat is safer than the luxury liner, though getting on it requires an urgent rearrangement of your body and your expectations."

"The frog shower in Magnolia provided more compelling proof of God’s existence than anything in God’s Not Dead."

"The Pentecostal treatment of AIDS is spurious in the extreme; I do not mean to suggest otherwise. But it is mistaken to think, as Westerners so often do, that this treatment is the refuge of the desperate, the poor, the people who have nowhere else to turn."

"Corporations exist as separate legal entities precisely to distinguish their activities from those of their owners. It is that separation that Hobby Lobby threatens to erase."

"Just a year ago—six months before Michael Hill—I was so suicidal that his coming in that school and taking my life would've been okay for me. I wouldn't have had the strength to talk him down—or myself."

"In theory, I do not condone book burning. But I couldn’t let something this atrocious live."

"The study was conducted by Susan Waterson, a professor of behavioral psychology at the University of Massachusetts and the author of zero books, because, Waterson says, 'another book at this point would just be cruel.'"

"This is a game that is so beautifully Methodist, I’m almost in tears."

Steve Thorngate

The Century managing editor is also a church musician and songwriter.

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