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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 82595b0 | evangelical and liberal are labels that inhibit rather than illumine the living nature of the gospel. | James K. Wellman Jr. | ||
| f106e6c | The question, then, the art, the task, the search, the challenge, the invitation is for you and me to become more and more the kind of people who are aware of the divine presence, attuned to the ruach, | Rob Bell | ||
| f106a77 | The intellect has a way of building a fence around the heart, cutting us off from what we know to be true in a way that is hard to prove according to the categories in which proof matters. | Rob Bell | ||
| 7b7a100 | Can you see why Jesus often began his teachings by saying "Repent!"? You know what repent means? It means to change your thinking, to see things in a new way, to have your mind renewed--all" | Rob Bell | ||
| a495f00 | First, I'm a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. | Rob Bell | ||
| 3b57cff | when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren't taking the entire world into account. | Rob Bell | ||
| 3b69ee8 | Mission is not a message given but a life lived; there is no ticket for another world. | James K. Wellman Jr. | ||
| 6fca4d8 | Postmoderns are not less interested in religion than ever before. Indeed, they are exploring new religious experiences like never before. The church has simply given them a less interesting religion than ever before. Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 09406e5 | Civilizations fall because the people inside the Sanctuary throw open the gates. | Bill Whittle | ||
| 5aae9a5 | Government can take your money at gunpoint; businesses have to persuade you. | Bill Whittle | ||
| 6e2aadb | We've gone from looking up at the moon to looking down at Instagram. | Bill Whittle | ||
| b8d3e80 | Don't we need some "secular" social space where diverse people of faith can encounter one another with some level of privacy and anonymity? Isn't the real scandal not that our religious leaders might be imagined walking across a road or talking as friends together in a bar, but rather that their followers are found speaking against one another as enemies, day after day in situation after situation? Questions like these have always mattered... | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| f07e3d7 | Growing numbers of us are acknowledging with grief that many forms of supremacy--Christian, white, male, heterosexual, and human--are deeply embedded not just in Christian history, but also in Christian theology. We are coming to see that in hallowed words like almighty, sovereignty, kingdom, dominion, supreme, elect, chosen, clean, remnant, sacrifice, lord, and even God, dangerous vices often lie hidden. . . . We are coming to see in the l.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| d9ba4c8 | globalism (for better or worse) transforms personal and ethnic identities, creating hyphenated and cosmopolitan identities--in which people consider themselves first and foremost citizens of the earth and members of the earth's ecosystem more than as citizens of a nation or members of a religion. This identity disruption creates fissures and fractures among existing elites who are still managing parochial national, cultural, ethnic, or reli.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 21ba55c | If, for you, orthodox means finally "getting it right" or "getting it straight," mine is a pretty disappointing, curvy orthodoxy. But if, for you, orthodoxy isn't a list of correct doctrines, but rather the doxa in orthodoxy, which means "thinking" or "opinion," then the lifelong pursuit of expanding thinking and deepening, broadening opinions about God sounds like a delight, a joy." | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 6e65310 | The new dimensions of the message are examples of the Spirit of truth doing what Jesus promised he would do: continuing | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| c12d540 | I have a confession to make.121 Almost every time I tune in to religious radio or TV, I want to change my religion. I | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| e4c9d43 | Because I follow Jesus, then, I am bound to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, atheists, New Agers, everyone (even religious broadcasters, I was just reminded by a still, small voice). Not only am I bound to them in love, but I am also actually called to, in some real sense (please don't minimize this before you qualify it), become one of them, to enter their world and be with them in it. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 917ce81 | there is no way to peace, but rather peace itself is the way to life in God's kingdom. (This | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| c0aaf4a | He creates a new kind of hero: not warriors, corporate executives, or politicians, but brave and determined activists for preemptive peace, willing to suffer with Him in the prophetic tradition of justice. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| d10e7ca | We must, therefore, never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God--whether in prose or in poetry. Romano | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 4372c90 | A generous orthodoxy is like that. It acknowledges that we're all a mess. It sees in our worst failures the possibility of our deepest repentance and God's opening for our most profound healing. It remembers Jesus' parable that wherever God sows good seed, "an enemy" will sow weed seeds. It realizes that you can't pull up the bad without uprooting the good too, and so it refrains from judging. It just rejoices wherever good seed grows." | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 0bb4537 | Here's the papal proclamation of 1455 that empowered the Christian kings of Europe to enslave, plunder, and slaughter in the name of discovery: invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their pers.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 861699e | Surely many courageous Christians spoke out against the savagery of their so-called civilized fellow Christians? And surely many compassionate Christians spoke out for the humanity of the so-called savages? Sadly, very, very few actually did, notable among them a Dominican friar, Bartolome de las Casas. His | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| b42c575 | George, if you deport the police from America, you get Mexico. | Bill Whittle | ||
| 5f811f9 | Bing? Who the fuck uses Bing? | Billie Eilish | ||
| 4738ea0 | With my own eyes I saw Spaniards cut off the nose, hands, and ears of Indians, male and female, without provocation, merely because it pleased them to do it....Likewise, I saw how they summoned the caciques and the chief rulers to come, assuring them safety, and when they peacefully came, they were taken captive and burned....They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill .. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 8ef816e | Oddly, I've never heard of a church or denomination that asked people to affirm a doctrinal statement like this: The purpose of Scripture is to equip God's people for good works. Shouldn't a simple statement like this be far more important than statements with words foreign to the Bible's vocabulary about itself (inerrant, authoritative, literal, revelatory, objective, absolute, propositional, etc.)? | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 6881a15 | The surface causes of environmental carelessness among conservative Christians are legion, including subcontracting the evangelical mind out to right-wing politicians and greedy business interests. Too often we put the gospel of Jesus through the strainer of consumerist-capitalism and retain only the thin broth that this modern-day Caesar lets pass through. We often display a reactionary tendency to be against whatever "liberals" are for. T.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 32d1297 | The wise preacher of Ecclesiastes might say, "There is a time for everything--a time to be laid-back and a time to be outraged; a time to be tolerant and a time to stand up and say, 'I'm not going to take this anymore.'" The challenge for all fighters, of course, is to be sure they find out what is now truly worth fighting against, and then to be sure they have something that is truly worth fighting for." | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| c129e52 | The popular and domesticated Jesus, who has become little more than a chrome-plated hood ornament on the guzzling Hummer of Western civilization, can thus be replaced with a more radical, saving, and, I believe, real Jesus. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 278f525 | And we are coming to see that this repentance and conversion do not express infidelity to Christ, but fidelity, because we are coming to see in the life and teaching of Christ, and especially in the cross and resurrection of Christ, a radical rejection of dominating supremacy in all its forms. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 3053b45 | In Christ, God is supreme, but not in the old discredited paradigm of supremacy: God is the supreme healer, the supreme friend, the supreme lover, the supreme life-giver who self-empties in gracious love for all. The king of kings and lord of lords is the servant of all and the friend of sinners. The so-called weakness and foolishness of God are greater than the so-called power and wisdom of human regimes. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| ddc4fac | Motivated thus by their beliefs in God and their lust for gold--as dangerous a cocktail today as then--the Spanish Christians ravaged Latin America, as did their Portuguese counterparts. Bartolome concludes, "We can estimate very truly and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe with.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| db06479 | In the aftermath of Jesus and his cross, we should never again define God's sovereignty or supremacy by analogy to the kings of this world who dominate, oppress, subordinate, exploit, scapegoat and marginalize.3 Instead, we have migrated to an entirely new universe, or, as Paul says, "a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17) in which old ideas of supremacy are subverted. If this is true, to follow Jesus is to change one's understanding of God. .. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 4c5bad1 | We might say that two thousand years ago, Jesus inserted into the human imagination a radical new vision of God--nondominating, nonviolent, supreme in service, and self-giving. That vision was so radically new and different that we have predictably spent our first two thousand years trying to reconcile it with the old visions of God that it challenged. Maybe only now, as we acknowledge Christianity to be, in light of our history, what the n.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| a64c23c | Community has become a buzzword in the church in recent years. Overbusy individuals hope they can cram it into their overstuffed schedules like their membership to a health and fitness club (which they never have time to use). Churches hope they can conjure it with candles, programs, or training videos. Anabaptists know that community is far more costly than that: one cannot add it to anything, rather one must begin with it in order to ente.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 80a99e1 | The statement serves as the basis for what is commonly called the Doctrine of Discovery, the teaching that whatever Christians "discover," they can take and use as they wish. It is breathtaking in its theological horror. Muslims (then called Saracens) and all other non-Christians are reduced to "enemies of Christ." Christians, even as they plunder, enslave, and kill, count themselves friends of Christ by contrast. Christian global mission i.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| cf86c15 | This papal document--which has not yet been repudiated by the Catholic Church--was the basis for the Christian justification of colonialism and the building of competitive Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, Belgian, German, and other Euro-Christian empires that spanned the world.13 It was the genocide card that was given to every white Christian nation. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| b1b935a | Schoolchildren don't normally learn this poem about Columbus's second voyage to Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today): "In fourteen hundred and ninety-five, sixteen hundred people he kidnapped alive." Columbus" | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| e49af4a | Columbus wrote this of his dehumanized "cargo": "It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell....Here there are so many of these slaves...although they are living things they are as good as gold." Columbus gave permission to his crew who remained in Hispaniola to enslave the native Taino people "in the amount desired." Columbus awarded a teenage Taino girl to one of his crew, Miguel .. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 9ca4900 | One might conclude that these were a few rogue rotten Spanish apples, acting in opposition to their faith. But notice the religious motivation for the cruelty described by Bartolome: They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, "Boil there,.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 9b37ed7 | was the identity of all non-Christians as "offspring of the devil" that allowed these acts "in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles," not in spite of Christianity, but because of it. Bartolome, of course, knew that there were other motivations as well: Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches i.. | Brian D. McLaren | ||
| 59d3176 | I am convinced that Jesus didn't come to start a new religion; he came to proclaim a new kingdom. | Brian D. McLaren |