January 2011
51 posts
“You can tell you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that...”
– Anne Lamott
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“I love America and I love being an American. The energy of Americans, the...”
– Stanley Hauerwas On America’s God
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“American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in...”
– Stanley Hauerwas on America’s God
“‘Give Thou bread’ — that is to say, let me have food through just labour. For,...”
– St. Gregory of Nyssa on the Lord’s Prayer (via fuckyeahchristianradicalism)
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“There is only one cause for the creation of the world - the purpose of...”
– Augustine, City of God
“As God, [Christ Jesus] is the goal; as man, he is the way.”
– Augustine, City of God
“Now the trumpet summons us again - not a call to bear arms, though arms we need...”
– JFK, Inaugural Address (1961)
“So let us begin anew - remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of...”
– JFK, Inaugural Address (1961)
“The very isolation of the individual - from power and community and ability to...”
– Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (1962)
Hauerwas on the pacifist response to September 11 →
That Americans get to decide who is and who is not a terrorist means that this is not only a war without clear purpose, but also a war without end. From now on we can be in a perpetual state of war. America is always at her best when she is on permanent war footing. Moreover, when our country is at war, it has no space to worry about the extraordinary inequities that constitute our...
“For human beings were created for happiness, and he who is completely happy can...”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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The Emerging Church Brand: The Good, the Bad, and... →
A decade or so ago, a bunch of young, mostly white evangelicals started seeing similar conversations beginning to spark all over the place about the reshaping of evangelicalism, the rethinking of missions, and reimagining what it really means to be the church. Language of “the emerging church” connected many of the dots, which remained primarily white evangelical men, many of whom had great...
Is the Emerging Church for Whites Only? →
Some might respond, so what? If the majority of people to whom the emerging church movement appeals are younger people of European descent and stylistic flair, then so be it. But there is a larger problem. As I continued my research, memories from my own spiritual journey flooded my mind—memories of hopelessness and longing, of wanting to believe there was something more rich and diverse ...
“A contemporary monk advised his brothers thus: “If you do not live by...”
– Desert Fathers
“Again, a certain other person asked him to explain to him exactly what...”
– Desert Fathers
“To see perfection in oneself is the beginning of error.”
– Saying of the Desert Fathers
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“The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are -...”
– John F. Kennedy on the Cuban Missile Crisis
“In my view, the claim that a particular event is an instance of God directly...”
– John P. Meier, “The Present State of the ‘Third Quest’ for the Historical Jesus: Loss and Gain”
“For the mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one...”
– Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“This need for the communality of worship is the chief torment of each man...”
– Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even...”
– Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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“If I am close to being right about the place of war for sustaining the American...”
– Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference
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“The intervention of a god in Greek tragedy - or at the very least an appeal to a...”
– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
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“To me the relationship of the ministry [of Jesus Christ] to the making of peace...”
– Martin Luther King Jr. (via changingperspective)
“It’s all right to talk about “long white robes over yonder,”...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr., I’ve Been to the Mountaintop
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“What is of importance today is not to get modern man to accept religion as a...”
– Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (133)
“My Lord God I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me....”
– Thomas Merton
Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Reinhold Niebuhr,... →
At its base, this is what makes Obama’s speech truly great. In the face of horrifying tragedy, humans need reason to believe in the “better angels of their nature.” It is not enough in such moments to chant “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” No, when shocked and scared, humans yearn for reassurance that the human condition is redeemable (which is party of what makes the notion of...
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“Test everything, hold fast to what is good.”
– 1 Thessalonians 5:21
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“The New Testament calls the covenant community of God’s people into...”
– Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
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“Legalists and antinomians are equally guilty of hermeneutical gerrymandering to...”
– Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
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“Legalists and antinomians are equally guilty of hermeneutical gerrymandering to...”
– Richard Hays
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“The New Testament calls the covenant community of God’s people into...”
– Richard Hays
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“The more “God” becomes identified with a divine principle within the … self, the...”
– Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
“Remind us that the places where we find you become altars in our world.”
– from January 1 Morning Prayer, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. (via brlouis)
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“8.23 We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its...”
– The Theological Declaration of Barmen: Karl Barth and the confessing church. Written in response to the rise of the Third Reich.
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“One such danger of such a strategy is that the Christian community might become...”
– Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
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“The New Testament canon does not, as such, constitute the foundation of the...”
– Ernst Kasemann
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“For the church, it is perhaps important to know that the obedience of faith was...”
– Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
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“The resurrection, just as much as the other events of the story, must be...”
– Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament