Hip hop poetics

"Rappers create, observes music critic Kelefa Sanneh, 'an outsized hero that has more sex than you're really having, that does more violence than you're really doing, that sells more drugs than you've ever sold.'LL Cool J as lover... Pac as thug poet. Biggie as lovable gangsta. 'The persona overshadows the person and the person can be crushed by the persona,' Nelson George remarks." -Adam Bradley, from Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop

Concealed Carry

"[Concealed carriers] see their guns as emblems of a whole spectrum of virtuous lifestyle choices - rural over urban, self-reliance over dependence on the collective, vigorous outdoorsiness over pallid intellectualism, patriotism over internationalism, action over inaction - and they hear attacks on guns as attacks on them, personally... From the point of view of gun enthusiasts, it's not gun violence these groups want to end, but gun ownership." -Dan Baum, from Harper's

Rebirth

"In some evangelical traditions, 'you must be born again' is regard virtually as the equivalent of a command to believe in Christ. It is something we must do. But in the New Testament new birth is something God gives. The point of the metaphor lies in the fact that the new birth is not something we can do... There is a paradox in the gospel at this point. For we discover that the one thing needful is almost the only thing outside our power to perform."
-Sinclair Ferguson, The Christian Life: A Doctrinal Introduction