I don’t follow many online newsletters, though I do like the comment.  I follow Matthew Anderson’s because he regularly talks through “Christian ethics” in a way that doesn’t happen as well as often.  One of my favorite parts of his newsletter, though, is the closing quote section.  He regularly posts tidbits from Oliver O’Donovan or Augustine or some other thinker that are encouraging and a reminder of the deep well that we can draw from.  Anderson ended his most recent newsletter (you can subscribe here) with a great quote from Stanley Hauerwas.  I may have read the quote before, but it’s gotten lost in later reading.  It’s nice to see something so pertinent and to-the-point.  I’ll be sharing it at work sometime soon, I imagine.

The story of God does not offer a resolution of life’s difficulties, but it offers us something better–an adventure and struggle, for we are possessors of the happy news that God has called people together to live faithful to the reality that he is the Lord of this world. All men have been promised that through the struggle of this people to live faithful to that promise God will reclaim the world for his Kingdom. By learning their part in this story, Christians claim to have a narrative that can provide the basis for a self appropriate to the unresolved, and often tragic, conflicts of this existence.