Mercola says:

These EMFs have demonstrable negative physiological effects, but very few people fully grasp this. We have been lulled into a false sense of security by an industry that is going to great lenghts to keep us in the dark, just like in the early days of smoking. And our government appears endlessly willing, even eager, to allow technology companies to do pretty much whatever they want -- including spending mountains of money to dissuade legislators from passing laws that would regulate an industry that is making it harder and harder to understand what the dangers are, much less avoid them. (p. 2; loc. 123)

Nonionizing radiation from your wireless devices actually creates carbonyl free radicals -- instead of hydroxyl radicals that ionizing radiation gives rise to -- that cause virtually identical damage to your nuclear DNA, cell membranes, proteins, mitochondria, and stem cells. (p. 15; loc. 259)

All mobile phone manufacturers recommend that you hold your phone at least 5 to 15 millimeters away from your body. Yet very few are aware of this directive. Sadly, your phone company buried it deep within the cell phone manual, which virtually no one ever reads. (p. 18; loc. 283)

In fact, when there are variations of more than 20 percent in the Earth's natural electromagnetic fields during magnetic storms or geomagnetic pulsations that occur approximately every 11 years due to changes in solar activity cycles, there are increased rates of animal and human health incidents, including nervous and psychiatric diseases, hypertensive cries, heart attacks, cerebral accidents, and mortality. (p. 20; loc. 312)

A study that scanned a collection of data from 1997 through 2013 examined 11,699 cases and 13,194 controls and concluded that "magnetic field level exposure may be associated with childhood leukemia." (p. 23; loc. 348)

Not only do fluorescent bulbs create dirty electricity [aka. MEP], but they also produce digital light with an unhealthy spectrum that is predominately blue, which disrupts your melatonin levels if you view it after sunset. So, an excellent strategy to improve your health is to limit your exposure to fluorescent lights at home and the office. (p. 26; loc. 384)

Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of National Vaccine Information Center (an NGO), says:

What we have now is 69 doses of 16 vaccines that the federal government is saying all...children should use from day of birth to age 18. Back when my children were receiving vaccines in the late 70s and 80s, it was 23 doses of 7 vaccines. So, we've had a tripling of the numbers of doses of vaccines that children are now getting....We have children -- 30 percent now of young adults have been diagnosed as having a mental illness, anxiety disorder, bipolar, schizophrenia. This is the worst public health report card in the history of this country. And it has coincided perfectly with the tripling of the numbers of vaccines.


Dr. Jennifer Margulis adds:

There was a study published in Pediatrics that showed that parents who decided to delay or forego some vaccines were parents who made over 70 thousand dollars a year and had the most education. So why is it that the best educated parents who have the highest socioeconomic income are choosing to delay some vaccines? It's not because something is wrong with those parents, it's because something is wrong with the current CDC vaccine schedule.

The Truth about Vaccines: 7 Episodes Complete Transcripts. Episode 1. (Hosted by Ty Bollinger)

Smith writes:

We are not just dawdling around in some anonymous cosmos; we are home. We are dwelling in God's world. This isn't just "nature"; it is creation. And it is "very good" (Gen. 1:31). The material creation is not just some detour from our heavenly existence. It is the very good abode created by our heavenly Father. Creation is not some icky, regrettable mistake on God's part. It is the product of his love. (p. 171)

We are called to be witnesses, not necessarily winners. (p. 174; but can't we be both?)

We are made to be makers, but as makers we remain lovers. So if you are what you love, then you make what you love. (p. 175)

Our making bubbles up from our imagination, which is fueled by a Story of what flourishing looks like. (p. 177)

The rite of baptism, where the congregation vows to help raise the child and come alongside the parents, is just the liturgical formation we need in order to be a people who can support those raising children with intellectual disabilities or those with the calling and courage to adopt special-needs children. (p. 181; amen times three)

Smith writes:

But what catches you short on some lonely evening of despair isn't a doctrine that you remember or all those verses you memorized from the book of Romans. What creeps up on you is the inexplicable emergency of this image of the shepherd from the deep recesses of your imagination's storehouse. With the image comes the story of a shepherd who is willing to leave the ninety-nine goody-two-shoes sheep who've done everything right in order to find that one stubborn, recalcitrant lamb. This image has stirred neurons in your stomach, it feels like, and somehow now you're in the middle of that story as that shepherd goes looking for the one wayward lamb, searching steadfastly. When he finds the bleating lamb cowering in a crevice, you can see the shepherd gently cradle the sheep and lift it out of its predicament with a smile and an encouraging, "C'mon, little guy." The he hoists you on his shoulders, and you can't wait to be carried home. (p. 142)

[W]e have stratified the one body of Christ into generational segments, moving children and young people out of the ecclesial center of worship into effectively "parachurch" spaces, even if they're still officially in the church building. By doing so, we have tacitly denied the unity and catholicity of the body, worshiping in ways that run counter to Paul's remarkable proclamation that "there is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all" (Eph. 4:4-6)....If young people are always and only gathered with and by themselves, how will they learn from exemplars, those model saints in the local congregation who have lived a lifetime with Jesus? (p. 145)

[W]e have created youth ministry that confuses extroversion with faithfulness. (p. 146)

And so the unintended consequence: in the name of curating an exciting, entertaining "experience" to keep young people in the faith, we end up only creating consumers of a Jesus message while disenchanting vast swaths of other young people who simply can't imagine signing up for a Jesus glee club. (p. 147)

Instead of relying on their own internal piety and willpower (which is a wrong-headed way to think about discipleship anyway), young people experience historic practices of prayer and devotion as gifts of grace in themselves, a way that the Spirit meets them where they are. (p. 147).

In historic practices we learn how to be a community of faith, not just a collection of atomistic individuals who happen to love the same Savior. (p. 148)

[C]hildren love tradition....Kids what to be part of something bigger and older than they are, something that has a kind of ancient stability and endurance about it that testifies to God's faithfulness. (p. 149-50)

A number of these intuitions can also spill over into K-12 classrooms, especially in Christian schools and homeschooling contexts. If liturgies are formative, that means they are implicit pedagogies or teaching strategies that can be marshaled in learning environments beyond the walls of the church. This reframes the goal and task of Christian education so that it's not only a matter of teaching students about the faith, nor is it merely a matter of teaching them to think about the world from a "Christian perspective." A holistic Christian education does both of these things but also aims to habituate students in the faith, seeing the school as an extended opportunity to create a learning environment that is not just informative but formative. A holistic Christian learning environment doesn't just fill the intellect; it fuels the imagination. (p. 154-5)

We are called to be, for example, Creation Enjoyers, Idolatry Discerners, Order Discoverers, Beauty Creators. (p. 156)

[V]irtue is often absorbed from exemplars. (p. 159)

If we, as educators, are going to be part of a classical project of education that seeks to form the whole person, to apprentice students to a love for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as revealed to us in Christ, then we need to be reformed and transformed. Educational reform, you might say, begins with us. (p. 160)

One of the most important practices we can undertake as Christian educators is to cultivate time and space to renarrate to one another just what we're doing together. (p. 161)

Smith says:

We love because he first loved us, but we learn how to love at home. (p. 113)

The frenetic pace of our lives means we often end up falling into routines without much reflection. We do what we think "good parents" do. And we might think the are just "things that we do" without recognizing that they may also be doing something to us. (p. 113-4)

[W]e need to relinquish our tendency to think of baptism "expressively." Baptism isn't primarily a way for us to show our faith and devotion. As with worship more generally, God is the agent here. Baptism is a sacrament precisely because it is a means of grace, a way that God's gracious initiative marks and seals us. It is the sign that God is a covenant-keeping Lord who fulfills his promises even when we don't. This is why, since the time of the early church, households have been baptized (Acts 16:33; 1 Cor. 1:16), and it is why, historically in "catholic" Christianity, believing parents present their children for baptism. As a sacrament, baptism is not a bottom-up expression of our faith but a top-down symbol of God's gracious promises. He chose us before we could believe; he loves before we even know how. (p. 114-5; amen and amen!)

Every Sunday is a marriage renewal ceremony. (p. 124)

Our households -- our "little kingdoms" -- need to be nourished by constant recentering in the body of Christ. (p. 125)

But what does it look like to parent lovers? What does it look like to curate a household as a formative space to direct our desires? How can a home be a place to (re)calibrate our hearts? (p. 127)

Children are ritual animals who absorb the gospel in practices that speak to their imaginations. (p. 129)

Creation is always more than we see. What might appear "natural" in suffused with God's grandeur. It is in worship that we learn to inhabit the world in this way, as an environment charged by the presence and activity of god. We can, therefore, look for ways to let the world's enchantment spill over into the so-called mundane spaces of our lives. We can look for ways to cultivate "enchanted households" that reflect this reality. (p. 130)

[N]ever underestimate the formative power of the family supper table. (p. 132)

The table at home is an echo of the Lord's Table; the communion of the saints is given microcosmic expression in the simple discipline of daily dinner together. (p. 136)

Smith says:

You won't be liberated from deformation by new information. God doesn't deliver us from the deformative habit-forming power of tactile rival liturgies by merely giving us a book. Instead, he invites us into a different embodied liturgy that not only is suffused by the biblical story but also, via those practices, inscribes the story into our hearts as our erotic calibration, bending the needle of our loves toward Christ, our magnetic north. (p. 83-4)

To be conformed to the image of his Son is not only to think God's thoughts after him but to desire what god desires. (p. 85)

Christian worship that will be counterformative needs to be embodied, tangible, and visceral. The way to the heart is through the body. That's why counterformative Christian worship doesn't just dispense information; rather, it is a Christ-centered imagination station where we regularly undergo a ritual cleansing of the symbolic universes we absorb elsewhere. Christian worship doesn't just teach us how to think; it teaches us how to love, and it does so by inviting us into the biblical story and implanting that story in our bones. (p. 85)

"What is the chief end of man?" the consumerist catechism asks. "To acquire stuff with the illusion that I can enjoy it forever." (p. 86)

Formative Christian worship paints a picture of the beauty of the Lord -- and a vision of the shalom he desires for creation -- in a way that captures our imagination....That means that Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures who are moved more that we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs. (p. 91)

Christian worship should tell a story that makes us want to set sail for the immense sea that is the Triune God, birthing in us a longing for "a better country -- a heavenly one" that is kingdom come (Heb. 11:16). The biblical vision of shalom -- of a world where the Lamb is our light, where swords are beaten into ploughshares, where abundance is enjoyed by all, where people from every tribe and tongue and nation sing the same song of praise, where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an everlasting stream -- is the vision that should be enacted in Christian worship. And that vision will captivate us, not just because we "know" it's what God wants, but because the tangible practices of Christian worship paint the picture, as it were -- in the metaphors of the biblical story, the poetics of the Psalms, the meter of hymns and choruses, the tangible elements of bread and wine, the visions painted in stained glass -- all of which works on our imaginations, teaching us to want. (p. 93, my favorite paragraph of the chapter)

The best art, Aristotle says, makes plausible what might otherwise seem impossible. It is a matter of mimetic persuasion: convincing us that this could be. (p. 93-4)

To be human is to inhabit some narrative enchantment of the world. (p. 94)

But in a sense, any book that summarizes the plot will never be the same as immersing yourself in the practices yourselves. (p. 99)

But one of the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation, [Charles] Taylor [in his magnum opus, A Secular Age] argues, was a disenchantment of the world....The result was a process of excarnation -- of disembodying the Christian faith, turning it into a "heady" affair that could be boiled down to a message and grasped with the mind. To use a phrase that we considered above, this was Christianity reduced to something for brains-on-a-stick. (p. 101)

What Christian communities need to cultivate in our "secular age" is faithful patience, even receiving a secular age as a gift through which to renew and cultivate an incarnational, embodied, robustly orthodox Christianity that alone will look like a genuine alternative to "the spiritual." (p. 102-3)

Here is a truth that the seeker-sensitive movement couldn't have imagined: people want to confess. (p. 105)

We're hooked by stories, not bullet points. (p. 107)

Smith writes:

Liturgies, then, are calibration technologies. They train our loves by aiming them toward a certain telos. But not all liturgies are created equal: some miscalculate our hearts, pointing us off course toward pseudo or rival norths. (p. 57)

I was reading Wendell Berry in the food court at Costco. (p. 60)

Christian worship is the feast where we acquire new hungers -- for God and for what God desires -- and are then send into his creation to act accordingly. (p. 65)

Christian worship is our enculturation as citizens of heaven, subjects of kingdom come (Phil. 3:20). (p. 66)

If you are a creature of habit whose loves have been deformed by disordered secular liturgies, then the best gift God could give you is Spirit-infused practices that will reform and retrain your loves. (p. 68)

Yes, Christian formation is a life-encompassing, Monday through Saturday, week in and week out project; but it radiates from, and is nourished by, the worship life of the congregations gathered around Word and Table. (p. 68)

Worship is not for me -- it's not primarily meant to be an experience that "meets my felt needs," nor should we reduce it to merely a pedagogy of desire (which would be just a more sophisticated pro me construal of worship); rather, worship is about and for God. To say that God is both subject and object is to emphasize that the Triune God is both the audience and the agent of worship: worship is to and for God, and God is active in worship in the Word and the sacraments. (p. 70)

When I encounter "Jesus" in such a liturgy [i.e. one without the ancient form of worship] rather than encountering the living Lord of history, I am implicitly being taught that Jesus is one more commodity available to make me happy. (p. 76)

When we realize that worship is also about formation, we will begin to appreciate why form matters. (p. 78)

The result is a rich legacy of worship wisdom that can be inherited by all Christians as a repertoire for faith formation. This is why we can say that the shape of historic, intentional, formative Christian worship is "catholic" -- not because it is "Roman" but because the repertoire of historic Christian worship represented the accumulated wisdom of the body of Christ led by the Spirit into truth, as Jesus promised (John 16:13). (p. 80)

In a formational paradigm, repetition isn't insincere, because you're not showing, you're submitting. This is crucial because there is no formation without repetition....If the sovereign Lord has created us as creatures of habit, why should we think repetition is inimical to our spiritual growth? (p. 80)

Smith says:

If I ask you, a Christian, to tell me what you really want, what you most deeply long for, what you ultimately love -- well, of course you know the right answer. You know what you ought to say. (p. 29)

Christian worship faces this disturbing reality head-on, recognizing the gap between what we think we love and what we really love, what still propels us toward rival gods and rival visions of the good life. (p. 29)

As lovers -- as desiring creatures and liturgical animals -- our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral. (p. 33)

Some cultural practices will be effectively training our loves, automating a kind of orientation to the world that seeps into your unconscious ways of being. That's why you might not love what you think; you might not love what that snowball of thinking on the tip of the iceberg tells you that you love. (p. 37)

Rome is a monster. (p. 39, humorous if intentionally taken out of context)

Indeed, we could be so fixated on intellectual temptations that we don't realize our hearts are being liturgically co-opted by rival empires all the while. (p. 40)

The mall is a religious site, not because it is theological but because it is liturgical. Its spiritual significance (and threat) isn't found in its "ideas" or it "messages" but in its rituals. The mall doesn't care what you think, but it is very much interested in what you love. Victoria's secret is that she's actually after your heart. (p. 41)

When we stop worrying about smartphones just in terms of content (what we're looking at) and start to consider the rituals that tether us to them throughout the day, we'll notice that the very form of the practice comes with an egocentric vision that makes me the center of the universe. (p. 46)

As such, the liturgies of the market and mall convey a stealthy message about my own brokenness (and hence a veritable need for redemption), but they do so in a way that plays off the power of shame and embarrassment. (p. 48-9)

What the liturgy of the mall trains us to desire as the good life and "the American way" requires such massive consumption of natural resources and cheap (exploitive) labor that it is impossible for this way of life to be universalized. (p. 53)

Smith writes:

[Jesus] asks, "What do you want?" This is the most incisive, piercing question Jesus can ask of us precisely because we are what we want. (p. 1-2)

As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: "You have to wager. It is not up to you, you are already committed." You can't not bet your life on something. You can't not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for. (p. 10)

We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we "think through" our options but rather because some picture captures our imagination....We aren't really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts us, drawing us toward it, and we thus live and work toward that goal. (p. 11-12)

Virtues, quite simply, are good moral habits....Virtues thus are different from moral laws or rules, which are external stipulations of the good. In fact, as Thomas Aquinas points out, there is an inversely proportionate relationship between virtue and the law: the more virtuous someone is -- that is, the more they have an internal disposition to the good that bubbles up from their very character -- the less they need the external force of the law to compel them to do the good. (p. 16-17)

We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love. These sorts of practices are "pedagogies" of desire, not because they are like lectures that inform us, but because they are rituals that form and direct our affections. (p. 21)

If you are what you love, and your ultimate loves are formed and aimed by your immersion in practices and cultural rituals, then such practices fundamentally shape who you are. At stake here is your very identity, your fundamental allegiances, you core convictions and passions that center both your self-understanding and your way of life. In other words, this contest of cultural practices is a competition for your heart -- the center of the human person designed for God, as Augustine reminded us. (p. 22)

To be human is to be a liturgical animal, a creature whose loves are shaped by our worship. And worship isn't optional. (p. 23)

Lewis writes in his essay "Membership":

That religions should be relegated to solitude in such is age is...dangerous for two reasons. In the first place, when the modern world says to us aloud, "You may be religious when you are alone," it adds under its breath, "and I will see to it that you are never alone." To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek calends. This is one of the enemy's stratagems. In the second place, there is the danger that real Christians who know that Christianity is not a solitary affair may react against that error by simply transporting into our spiritual life that same collectivism which has already conquered our secular life. That is the enemy's other stratagem.

The Weight of Glory. Harper One: New York, NY. 1980. p. 160-161