Famous Quotes & Sayings

Leland Ryken Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 42 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Leland Ryken.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 882104

No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 2051084

Ease and luxury, such as our affluence brings us today, do not make for maturity; hardship and struggle do, — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 989232

Puritan leaders, at least, valued an educated mind over material riches. Cotton Mather admonished his congregation with the comment, "If your main concern be to get the riches of this world for your children, and leave a belly full of this world unto them, it looks very suspiciously as if you were yourselves the people of this world, whose portion is only in this life."30 — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 272135

It is true that the Puritans banned all recreation on Sundays and all games of chance, gambling, bear baiting, horse racing, and bowling in or around taverns at all times. They did so, not because they were opposed to fun, but because they judged these activities to be inherently harmful or immoral. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 471257

Earlier in this century someone claimed that we work at our play and play at our work. Today the confusion has deepened: we worship our work, work at our play, and play in our worship. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1649274

The end of learning, he said, is to "repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him" by acquiring "true virtue" (Hughes 631). This reinforces and expands Sidney's point that the end of learning is virtuous action. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1773553

Part of what Milton valued in a good book then was contact with the mind of an author rendered otherwise inaccessible by distance or time. Such contact is precisely what much modern and postmodern criticism insists we cannot have. Perhaps a secular world view inevitably leads to a universe in which a text is merely a playing field for the reader's own intellectual athleticism. Perhaps only a Christian view (such as Milton's) of the imago descending from God to author to text can preserve the writing of literature as an act of communication. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 81624

The only knowledge that is worthwhile, writes Northrop Frye. is the knowledge that leafs to wisdom, for knowledge without wisdom is a body without life. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 723564

The Puritans' sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 143600

When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term 'Puritanism' as applied to Victorian religious hypocrisy. This does not apply to seventeenth-century Puritanism. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1519402

In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1840037

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 388664

A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1490743

As Francis Schaeffer reminded us, "The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars" (5). — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 2253961

The secularization of Western culture was accompanied by the elevation of art to the position of a substitute religion to replace Christianity. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 912972

The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1608408

To enjoy in tragedy that which one would not willingly suffer in reality is "miserable madness" (miserabilis insania). — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1811632

Literature takes reality and human experience as its starting point, transforms it by means of the imagination, and sends readers back to life with renewed understanding of it and zest for it because of their excursions into a purely imaginary realm. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1947225

Richard Rogers was lecturing at Wethersfield, Essex, someone told him, "Mr. Rogers, I like you and your company very well, but you are so precise." To which Rogers replied, "O Sir, I serve a precise God. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1983827

The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 2138950

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 999827

William Perkins said, The end of a man's calling is not to gather riches for himself ... but to serve God in the serving of man, and in the seeking the good of all men. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1361299

Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1353320

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1337128

For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1319193

Literature enlarges our world of experience to include both more of the physical world and things not yet imagined, giving the "actual world" a "new dimension of depth" (Lewis, Of Other Worlds 29). This makes it possible for literature to strip Christian doctrines of their "stained glass" associations and make them appear in their "real potency" (37), a possibility Lewis himself realized in the Narnia series and the space trilogy. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1306691

The Puritan divine Richard Steele wrote, God doth call every man and woman ... to serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own and the common good. ... The Great Governor of the world hath appointed to every man his proper post and province. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1260466

The Bible is obviously a mixed book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side within the covers of this unique book. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1220012

There is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or the theological outline, but the story, the poem, and the vision
all of them literary forms and products of the imagination (though not necessarily the fictional imagination). Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 1018759

Since God is the one who calls people to their work, the worker becomes a steward who serves God. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 993430

Stressing the God-centered life can lead to an otherworldly withdrawal from everyday earthly life. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 906974

In a sermon I heard recently, the minister claimed that the portrait of God as a storm god (a literary motif that he did not name) in Psalm 97 is based on allusions to the Exodus and is 'not mere window dressing,' that is, metaphoric. As I observed to this preacher later, he used a metaphor in his denigration of metaphor as mere window dressing. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 822764

He who suffers conquers. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 782135

How can we distinguish between the good and perverted use of beauty? — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 712871

How does one balance the fallen and redeemed aspects of life in the artistic portrayal of human experience in the world? — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 709380

Readers should aspire to what is excellent. They should refuse to read a substitute Bible. They should want a Bible that calls them to their higher selves - or to something higher than their current level of attainment. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 579971

With so many contradictory renditions of the biblical text, the public has lost confidence that we can actually know what the Bible says. It is an easy step from this skepticism to an indifference about what the Bible says. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 393888

The goal of Bible translation is be transparent to the original text - to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 293009

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 209067

In 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers provided a detailed analysis of that creative process in The Mind of the Maker. She developed the relevance of the imago Dei for understanding artistic creation in explicitly trinitarian terms. In every act of creation there is a controlling idea (the Father), the energy which incarnates that idea through craftsmanship in some medium (the Son), and the power to create a response in the reader (the Spirit). These three, while separate in identity, are yet one act of creation. So the ancient credal statements about the Trinity are factual claims about the mind of the maker created in his image. Sayers delves into the numerous literary examples, in what is one of the most fascinating accounts ever written both of the nature of literature and of the imago Dei. While some readers may feel she has a tendency to take a good idea too far, The Mind of the Maker remains an indispensable classic of Christian poetics. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 166388

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise. — Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken Quotes 124379

There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible. — Leland Ryken