Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
Eugene Peterson, in his new memoir, on the pastor’s place in contemporary society.
The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. . . . I love being an American. I love this place in which I have been placed — its language, its history, its energy. But I don’t love ‘the American way,’ its culture and values. I don’t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed….The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from these cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus.
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Texas Senator John Cornyn, doubling down on a Senate colleague’s absurd exaggeration of how much of Planned Parenthood’s work is abortion-related.
Well, I’m not so sure. Here I am in the middle of the debate and I’m not so sure. I’ve been told that 98 percent of the services they offer to pregnant women are abortion-related services. I’m not sure, but I think we ought to find out … I actually went on Planned Parenthood’s website yesterday to try and see if I could get some good info, and I came up empty.
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Tennessee state Sen. Jim Summeville, a Tea Party Republican, demanding that his state’s legislature pass radical “reforms” targeting public education.
Make no mistake, the final responsibility is ours, and we are warriors. We will bend public education to our awe, or break it all to pieces.
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Texas state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, explaining how abstinence-only advocates are so extreme that they opposed his legislation in 2009 requiring that information taught in sex education classes at least be medically accurate. The bill died in committee.
The pediatrician on the committee wouldn’t vote for it; he was the swing vote.
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Maine Tea Party Patriots’ coordinator Andrew Ian Dodge, voicing concerns by libertarians that the Tea Party movement has been taken over by the religious right’s agenda.
I want to build on our success, not ruin the coalition by bringing ‘God’s will’ into it.
