Jesus is offering us a holiday at the sea, but we must be willing to abandon our mud pies in the slums. - Skye Jethani

Advertising has formed us to give our affection not only to the products we consume, but also to the personified corporations that supply them.

The personification of institutions in our culture means the institutional church, rather than the flesh-and-blood people of God, has become the vehicle of God's mission in the world. This is salvation via institution, paradise via programs.

Since the Enlightenment's coronation of knowledge, generations of Christians had brains full of biblical knowledge and doctrine, but their lives showed little evidence of the transformation Jesus called forth in his Sermon on the Mount.