Quotes about Religion

One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.

One would think that people who insist on being monotheistic would be the first in line to walk across the artificial boundaries created by nation states, class systems, cultures and even religions. But often they are the last!

A nation that honors God will always be honored by God. I've seen nations that have dishonored God: God has been taken out of schools, the government, the military; and when you take Him out of a nation, how can you expect God to protect this nation?

My parents haven't reached out to me once. They're religious but not godly.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

That age of the church which was most fertile in subtle questions was most barren in religion; for it makes people think religion to be only a matter of cleverness, in tying and untying of knots.

People are so inoculated in childhood with small doses of Christianity that they seldom catch the real thing.

Most of your statues in churches do not correspond to the picture I have of you. In the statues you are shown very much like a nun, with a rosary in your hand. You are smiling serenely. But nuns have no children. You have. Your true likeness has yet to be depicted.

Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel. So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.

If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus

We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.

Jesus is supracultural. He is present within all cultures, and yet outside of all cultures. He is for all people, and yet he refuses to be co-opted or owned by any one culture. That includes any Christian culture. Any denomination. Any church. Any theological system. We can point to him, name him, follow him, discuss him, honor him, and believe in him—but we cannot claim him to be ours any more than he's anyone else's.