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Mary-born Lord, humble us so that we also might say, “Let it be with me according to your word.

That which makes the church “radical” and forever “new” is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. In the church’s view, the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend towards solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus.

Jesus is the parable of the Father’s love given to transform us so that we might be drawn into the new creation called the kingdom of God.

The church occupies the space he has made so that the world may see what a people look like who are not determined by the destructive fantasy that we can secure our lives through violence.

We are, quite rightly, not interested in the theoretical issue of suffering and evil; rather, we are torn apart by what is happening to real people, to those we know and love.

North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation.

I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.

We believe that many Christians do not fully appreciate the odd way in which the church, when it is most faithful, goes about its business. We want to claim the church’s “oddness” as essential to its faithfulness.

America is Rome, by which I mean we are a country that is so powerful that we can do what we want to do to other people and not fear the consequences. Americans are extremely frightened to live in a world in which we are so powerful, which is why we’ll go to any length to make ourselves feel safe. So America has gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I fear your generation will harvest the result.

Ministers should be the most political of animals because, in contrast to much of what passes as politics in our time, those in the ministry cannot help but be about the formation of a people who can know they need one another to survive. To ask those in the ministry to take seriously your political responsibilities may well entail a radical reorientation of what those in the ministry do. That is particularly true if you believe as I do that we are living at the end of Christendom. Recovering.

A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities. They will ask questions like “why does a good God let bad things happen to good people ” such people cannot imagine that a people once existed who produced and sang the psalms. If we learn to say “God ” we will do so with the prayer “My God my God why have you forsaken me?

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.

I need to be clear. I am not suggesting that the individual wealthy person is dull. Rather I am suggesting that a social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid producing people whose souls are superficial and whose daily lives are captured by sentimentalities. They ask questions like, “Why does a good god let bad things happen to good people?” Such a people cannot imagine what kind of people would write and sing the Psalms.

Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.

As long as it is assumed that war is always an available option, we will not be forced to imagine any alternative to war.

I do not put much stock in “believing in God.” The grammar of “belief” invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. “Belief” implies propositions about which you get to make up your mind before you know the work they are meant to do.

We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.

Rather than helping us to judge our needs, to have the right needs which we exercise in right ways, our society becomes a vast supermarket of desire under the assumption that if we are free enough to assert and to choose whatever we want we can defer eternally the question of what needs are worth having and on what basis right choices are made. What we call “freedom” becomes the tyranny of our own desires.

When Christianity is assumed to be an “answer” that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be.

Jesus is Lord’ is not my personal opinion. I take it to be a determinative political claim.

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.

I have assumed my clear commitment to a Trinitarian orthodoxy was sufficient evidence that I have not intentionally ignored the role of the Holy Spirit. It may be true, however, that my work has been so Christ-centred, I may have given the impression that the Holy Spirit is an afterthought.

As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression.

My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can lay only one brick at a time.

From my perspective, ‘postmodernism’ merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.

No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd drive this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It’s just one damn thing after another.

The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.

The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection.

In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.

From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical “I gotcha!” It is often an attempt to kill or wound others.

Whatever it means to be a Christian, it at least involves the discovery of friends you did not know you had.

From time to time it may find it useful to send out missionaries, but its first missionary task is to be a witness in and to the worlds in which it finds itself. All missionary tasks are in that sense local.

When you are trying to change the questions, you have to realize that many people are quite resistant to such a change. They like the answers they have.

Consider the problem of taking showers with Christians. They are, after all, constantly going on about the business of witnessing in the hopes of making converts to their God and church. Would you want to shower with such people? You never know when they might try to baptize you.

Saints cannot exist without a community.

To come to terms with our beginning requires a truthful story to acquire the skills to live in gratitude rather than resentment for the gift of life.

I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.

Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about.

If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.

The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.

No powers determine our lives more completely than those we think we have under our control. I.

The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foretaste of the unity of the communion of the saints.

Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.

The courageous have fears that cowards never know.

To be poor does not mean you lack the means to extend charity to another. You may lack money or food, but you have the gift of friendship to overwhelm the loneliness that grips the lives of so many.

Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.

I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.

We don’t fall in love and then get married; instead we get married and then learn what love requires.

I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, though that can be a problem, but that what we say we believe does not seem to make any difference for either the church or the world.

Christianity is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian, but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.

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