Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If fulfillment is gained through giving ourselves through intimate relationships, then allowing ourselves to be consumed with the cares of things, instead of the care of persons, is foolish.
I think there are other issues that the Democrats could use to rally evangelicals. There are a lot of us, for instance, who believe that the Bible calls us to be environmentally responsible.
Getting the government to put money into social programs run by religious institutions is a practice that started during the Clinton years, when Bill Clinton advocated the AmeriCorps program.
Those issues are biblical issues: to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to stand up for the oppressed. I contend that if the evangelical community became more biblical, everything would change.
So I really would like to see both parties respond to the poor with greater commitment. But I've got to tell you, the Democrats, I feel, are doing a better job in that respect than Republicans are.
But I contend that if we're providing total medical coverage for every man, woman, and child in Iraq, shouldn't we at least be doing the same thing for every man, woman, and child in the United States?
I've got some repenting to do. I doubt, however, that those who have wedded Christianity with laissez-faire capitalism will see things this way. I can just hear them saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Often, we ignore the fact that our spiritual condition and psychological state of mind are highly affected by what is happening to us physically. Sometimes depression is simply the result of exhaustion.
The two hot issues are the gay issue and the abortion issue. These are the two defining issues in the evangelical community these days. I'm sure that these hot buttons will be pushed, time and time again.
If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America.
It has taken countless hours of prayer, study, conversation and emotional turmoil to bring me to the place where I am finally ready to call for the full acceptance of Christian gay couples into the Church.
There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations.
Because of the increase in life longevity, America can now assume that at any given time three, and perhaps four, former presidents will still be alive, even when the current president is occupying the White House.
Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.
I contend the state ought to do its thing and provide legal rights for all couples who want to be joined together for life. The church should bless unions that it sees fit to bless, and they should be called marriages.
There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that tell us we must be committed to protecting the poor and the oppressed... There is no concern of Scripture that is addressed so often and so powerfully as reaching out to the poor.
What we need to affirm is that Jesus is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Whenever we marry Jesus to a political party, we are committing the sin of idolatry. We are making Jesus into the image of our political party.
There is a gift of the Holy Spirit that is given to both men and women in the New Testament. This is what makes the New Testament a New Testament rather than the Old Testament, in which women did not have such privileges.
I contend that Bush would be a lot more moderate if there weren't some fundamentalists breathing down his neck every time he wants to establish the state of Israel, every time he wants to do justice for the Palestinian people.
I don't think that John Kerry is the Messiah or the Democratic Party is the answer, but I don't like the evangelical community blessing the Republican Party as some kind of God-ordained instrument for solving the world's problems.
We ought to get out of the judging business. We should leave it up to God to determine who belongs in one arena or another when it comes to eternity. What we are obligated to do is to tell people about Jesus, and that's what I do.
I don't know what to make of the Muslim mystics, especially those who have come to be known as the Sufis. What do they experience in their mystic experiences? Could they have encountered the same God we do in our Christian mysticism?
One of the most startling discoveries of my life was the realization that the Jesus that I love, the Jesus who died for me on Calvary, that Jesus, is waiting, mystically and wonderfully, in every person I meet. I find Jesus everywhere.
I am not suggesting that all those missionary organizations working in Haiti should pack up and go home, but I am urging them to understand that Haiti does not need clever Americans with newly contrived schemes for saving their country.
That's what they do in Europe. You go down to the city hall and you become legally connected. You have a civil union there. Then, if you're religious, you go down to the church, and the church blesses the union. That gets the problem solved.
I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.
Most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters - and I am an evangelical, so I can say most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters - are quite willing to pack women off and send them as missionaries to dangerous places where they might get killed.
I, for one, am quite willing to join the 'forgive, forget and move on' crowd, but it does make me wonder if Evangelicals are going to sound believable when they say that they tend to vote Republican because of their religious commitments to the family.
Red Letter Christians believe in the doctrines of the Apostle's Creed, are convinced that the Scriptures have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, and make having a personal transforming relationship with the resurrected Christ the touchtone of their faith.
When you talk about evangelicals, don't forget that a significant proportion of the evangelical community is African American. And most African Americans - well over 90 percent, thoroughly evangelical, thoroughly biblical - will probably vote Democratic.
So after the Lewinsky scandal, everything changed, and we moved from using the Bible to address the moral issues of our time, which were social, to moral issues of our time that were very personal. I have continued that relationship up until the present.
There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.
A Christian school should be a place where young men and young women go through a period of spiritual formation and development so that they come out incredibly more proficient at living out their calling than they would have been had they not gone to school.
Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?
When you listen to Christian radio stations - and there are thousands of them now in the United States - and when you listen to Christian television networks - and there are thousands of Christian television shows across the country - they are all politically right.
When in fact we live in a society that makes life hell for gays and lesbians, this community has got to stand up and say, ‘We’re on your side as you struggle for dignity,’ and, ‘Yes, we will defy anybody who says otherwise, even if we have to go to Disneyland to prove it.’
Nothing is more dangerous than to live out the will of God in today's contemporary world. It changes your whole monetary lifestyle...Let me put it quite simply: If Jesus had $40,000 and knew about the kids who are suffering and dying in Haiti, what kind of car would he buy?
President Bush once said that marriage is a sacred institution and should be reserved for the union of one man and one woman. If this is the case - and most Americans would agree with him on this - then I have to ask: Why is the government at all involved in marrying people?
The gospel is not about... pie-in-the-sky when they die. ... It is imperative that the up and coming generation recognize that the biblical Jesus was committed to the realization of a new social order in this world.... Becoming a Christian, therefore, is a call to social action.
I'm not denying that depression can be spiritually induced. Guilt from having wronged and hurt others can bring it on. A sense of having failed to live out the will of God can give rise to depression. Certainly the fear of death and what might follow can sap the joy out of life.
If four years of university can increase your effectiveness of what you can do for others in the name of Christ, it is the best investment that you can make. But if the education is simply to get a job to make a lot of money, you have to raise the question of why you're doing it.
While a case can be made for intelligent design, I can't figure out why some Christians are so thrilled about that possibility. First of all, it doesn't prove there's a God. If anything, intelligent design lends support to some form of pantheism that defines God as immanent within nature.
What if Barack Obama established a Presidential Advisory Committee that would meet once every couple of months, bringing together the former presidents for a conference in order to seek their collective wisdom? There is a wealth of experience in former presidents that generally goes untapped.
Perhaps because our culture and politics have gone so off course, with values so contrary to those of Jesus, more and more people intuitively recognize that His vision of God's kingdom-a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace- is the Good News they've been searching and waiting for.
The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication.
He saved us in order that He might begin to transform His world into the kind of world that He willed for it to be when He created it. … When Jesus saved us, He saved us to be agents of a great revolution, the end of which will come when the kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdom of our God
Flipping the dial through available radio stations there will blare out to any listener an array of broadcasts, 24/7, propagating Religious Right politics, along with what they deem to be “old-time gospel preaching.” This is especially true of what comes over the airwaves in Bible Belt southern states.
Flipping the dial through available radio stations there will blare out to any listener an array of broadcasts, 24/7, propagating Religious Right politics, along with what they deem to be 'old-time gospel preaching.' This is especially true of what comes over the airwaves in Bible Belt southern states.
Beyond these models of reconciliation, a theology of mysticism provides some hope for common ground between Christianity and Islam. Both religions have within their histories examples of ecstatic union with God, which seem at odds with their own spiritual traditions but have much in common with each other.
Freud taught us that it wasn't God that imposed judgment on us and made us feel guilty when we stepped out of line. Instead, it was the superego - that idealized concept of what a good person is supposed to be and do - given to us by our parents, that condemned us for what had been hitherto regarded as ungodly behavior.