Charitable Writing Quotes

“Listen in. LIsten up. Listen closely. Stop, look, and listen. These and other familiar expressions speak to the distinct state that is listening: it requires that we press in, wake up, draw close, stop whatever else we are doing. Listening places heavy demands on mind and body alike. It is hard work. For this reason, numerous commentators over the ages have argued that few people truly listen well. Most of us, most of the time, do it poorly, barely, and perhaps not at all. In a radio broadcast titled "Listen to This," the American writer Alice Duer Miller remarked, 'People love to talk but hate to listen... Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what's being told us.' Miller then encapsulated her lesson in a memorable image: 'You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“For the community's quieter members, the call to humble listening is, seemingly paradoxically, a call to speak up. If others build an auditorium for you, you do them a disservice if you fail to sing. As we noted above, humble listening must declare itself: you are simply not listening well if you don't talk back. When your peers speak, they need to hear from you. At the very least, they need to know that they have been properly understood, and they often need to receive your comments and criticisms so that they can improve their ideas and arguments. The same is true when you speak up. In his "Prayer Before Study," Aquinas reminds us that we have been born into the "twofold darkness" of "sin and ignorance." As limited creatures who are prone to error, we all need to hear from others.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“Viewing writing as exploration means that you don't have to have it all worked out before you begin. We find just such a sentiment modeled by Augustine. Responding to a criticism of his book on free will, he wrote, 'I endeavor to be one of those who write because they have made some progress, and who, by means of writing, make further progress.' Similarly, the twentieth-century Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor admitted, 'I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.' Simply stated: we may write to learn what we think.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“In the ideal, our writing would be a feast, welcoming and enlivening to our readers. Yet we must recognize that a reader is also a kind of host. Readers receive our writing, bringing it into their homes, giving it their time and attention. The challenge of charitable writing, then, isn't simply to be a good host. It is, at the same time, to be a good guest. Our aspiration must not be simply to love others through our writing, as if we are all-sufficient. With all humility, we may earnestly hope that our writing will be an occasion to be loved.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“Putting your name on a piece of writing is a way of taking responsibility for it, and writing can be a profound mode of self-discovery. Our point is simply that charitable writing isn't an exercise in self-enclosure. It is an art "prodigious" in outward gestures.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“These remarks help us to see that there's more to the Christian understanding of humility than a simple negative definition like "the absence of pride" acknowledges. Humility frees us from excessive self-regard, thereby allowing our attention to turn elsewhere. [C. S. ] Lewis's observation that humble people take a "real interest" in what others say to them points to a major theme of Christian thinking about what humility makes possible: humility opens us up to the world outside our own heads.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“Now we can acknowledge fully that hope is the virtue that enables us to live through the process of growing into charity and the other virtues. Without hope, every misstep that we make as writers might seem like the failure of the whole scheme. Without hope, the project of charitable writing in fact might seem impossible for us fallen creatures. Hope is the virtue that sees past immediate peril. Hope is the virtue that trusts that there's more to our writing, more possibilities, than we can now see. To adapt wise words about hopeful reading from our friend and colleague Tiffany Eberle Kriner, 'Hopeful [writers write] texts in light of their futures as bringers of the glory to God. They acknowledge that texts exist in the space and time of the not-yet, that they are incomplete and still developing.' And why do we hope Because we trust in the Lord. Regarding the seemingly unattainable divine commands, such as the law of love, we do well to recall the wise observation of the theologian John Wesley that the Lord's commandments are tantamount to promises. As philosopher Jerry Walls explains, 'So when God commands us to do something, implicit in the command is his promise that he will enable us to do it.' God can, and will, love us into charity.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“Charitable Writing represents our attempt to reconcile "grand, sweeping truths" with the perfectly ordinary goings-on of the writing life. Like making the bed, the craft of writing gives us an opportunity to carve a little space of order amidst the chaos of the world around us. [...] More important still, if we strive to write charitably, we participate in God's greatest and most astonishing enterprise: loving us.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“One's local writing community may in fact have established rituals of revision in place, as when members of writing groups workshop each other's pieces. We've noticed that students sometimes worry about being a burden on their peers at such moments. Should that fear creep up on you, we urge you to remember that we are not called to play the part of host exclusively. We, too, are called to be guests, which is to say that we are called both to give love and to receive it. When we ask a peer for help, we become the neighbor.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“When we revise, we're getting our written house in order to host our readerly guests. As with a house, a strong foundation and good structural integrity are of utmost importance. Just as we wouldn't want to invite people to visit our home during a big remodeling project, we don't want them to spend time with our half-formed and disorganized ideas. Once we have the foundation and structure in place, we can turn our attention to the paragraphs and sentences. Like the décor and furniture in the rooms of our house, we want our argument's parts to work well together and to make our readers feel that they belong. If things are too spartan, we may need to add a familiar example or two, like repainting a wall to make it pop or buying a few new decorative pillows. If we're prone to hoarding, we must get rid of extraneous material - the empty boxes and stacks of magazines that will get in our guests' way as they move about the house. Then we ought to concern ourselves with the preferences of our guests. Have we stocked the fridge with their favorite drinks? Are we planning meals that they like and aren't allergic to? As the hosting draws closer, we should turn our attention to beautifying the entryway and our housekeeping tasks. Does our title have enough "curb appeal"? Did we fix the light bulbs in the introduction? Then it's time to straighten things up and clean. Editing grammar and spelling is a bit like dusting and vacuuming: the reader won't notice when you've done it, but it'll be conspicuous if you don't.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“... perfectionism stems from pride, the root cause of all the vices. Pride tells us that we can go it alone, avoiding sin and its deathly consequences without help from anyone, including God. Here again, cultivating the discipline of writing first drafts can help. They're a low-stakes place to make and learn from mistakes, and they may just teach you to rely on people and processes who are (thank God) outside of your control.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“... procrastination is often the enemy of charitable writing. When we slap something together late at night as a result of our "restless busyness," we are missing the opportunity...”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“While laziness is indeed one manifestation of sloth, the problem actually runs deeper. According to [Rebecca Konyndyk] DeYoung, sloth "is resistance to the discipline and transformation demanded by our new identity as God's beloved children." Sloth, she counterintuitive argues, is as much a problem for the world's busy people as it is its loafers. The reason is that sloth is actually opposed not to diligence per se but to fervently seeking to fulfill our duties. On DeYoung's telling, the "restless busyness" of our lives is often a form of escapism from the tasks that really require our attention, above all loving God and our neighbors.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“In other words, "restless," eleventh-hour writing isn't simply problematic because it's likely to be slapdash; it's also antisocial. It cuts out the opportunities for others to join us on the way. It narrows the window of time that we have to understand what our writing is doing, and for whom. Instead of a feast, we end up dishing out fast food.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“... both slow making and slow writing are multi-step procedures that play out according to rhythms of activity, contemplation, and rest.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“We believe that the Christian tradition gives us an alternative way of conceiving the time of writing. Writing need not simply take time; ... writing can be a means of keeping time.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“Some have guessed at the words that Jesus wrote in the dust - Saint Jerome, for one, suggested that Jesus was listing the transgressions of the woman's accusers - but the marks remain a mystery. He may have simply been doodling! However, what Jesus scrawled is less important than what the act itself helped to accomplish. Reflecting on Jesus' silence when he stands trial before Pontius Pilate, Rowan Williams observes that Jesus "takes the powerlessness that has been forced on him and turns it around so that his silence becomes a place in the world where the mystery of God is present." The scene we have been discussing bears witness to a similar truth: Christ's act of silent writing helped to usher in God's mystery and justice, granting power to the powerless and mercy to the sinner. Thus, while we have no way of knowing what Jesus inscribed, the nature of his act of writing seems perfectly clear. It was, as with all of Jesus' deeds, an act of love. With a finger in the dust, our Lord modeled charitable writing.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“But to say that charity is a virtue doesn't get us far enough; it doesn't help us to see it clearly as distinct from other virtues. Of its particular qualities, the theologian J. I. Packer offers a magnificent summary.
[...]
* First, it has as its purpose doing good to others, and so in some sense making the others great. Agapē Godward [that is, directed toward God], triggered by gratitude for grace, makes God great by exalting him in praise, thanksgiving, and obedience. Agapē [humanward], neighbor love as Scripture calls it, makes fellow humans great by serving not their professed wants, but their observed real needs. Thus, marital agapē seeks fulfillment for the spouse and parental agapē seeks maturity for the children.

* Second, agapē is measured not by sweetness of talk or strength of feeling, but by what it does, and more specifically by what of its own it gives, for the fulfilling of its purpose.

* Third, agapē does not wait to be courted, nor does it limit itself to those who at once appreciate it, but it takes the initiative in giving help where help is required, and finds its joy in bringing others benefit. The question of who deserves to be helped is not raised; agapē means doing good to the needy, not to the meritorious, and to the needy however undeserving they might be.

* Fourth, agapē is precise about its object. The famous Peanuts quote, 'I love the human race - it's people I can't stand,' is precisely not agapē. Agapē focuses on particular people with particular needs, and prays and works to deliver them from evil.

Packer concludes the passage with one last overarching observation, which we believe warrants its own bullet point:

* In all of this {agapē] is directly modeled on the love of God revealed in the gospel.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“In the English-speaking world, talk about "love" is muddled by our tendency to squeeze many human types of love into a single syllable. C. S. Lewis recognized this problem sixty years ago, prompting him to compose a little book titled The Four Loves. The four on which Lewis concentrates all enjoy classical pedigrees: affection, friendship, romantic love (which he calls "eros"), and charity. Unsurprisingly, Lewis gives his highest praise to the last member of the group, which he presents as the distinctly Christian form of love. This is the form that answers the Lord's call to love God and neighbor. Lewis argues, however, that the other three loves bring great benefits to our lives as well. It is good to be affectionate, to have friends, to be "in love." Yet the Oxford don saw that none of these loves is from a Christian perspective "self-sufficient." "If the feeling is to be kept sweet," affection, friendship, and romance must be anchored elsewhere. Charity is the spring from which all other loves flow.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words