#church

Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty ↗

— Albert Einstein

#holocaust #courage

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality. ↗

— Richard Rohr

#culture #theology #courage

Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together. ↗

— James Madison

#government #religion #religion

I am accountable. I am correctable. I am transformable. Presenting myself a living sacrifice to God. By the love of God. By the word of God. Completely supplied in Christ Jesus. Unto all good works. ↗

— Carlton T. Brown

#church #inspirational #religion #death

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#churchill #friend #library #life #read

Christian community is like the Christian's sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#faith

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village". ↗

— David James Duncan

#clinton #community #corporations #environment #spirituality

The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. ↗

— Dallas Willard

#god #the-church #love

The wealthy, Jesus says, can only get into heaven through the eye of a needle; the same applies to churches wealthy in numbers and programs. ↗

— Mark Galli

#heaven #money #money

I was married awfully young and I felt trapped. My wife had been divorced and all the time we were married we were out of the Church. It wasn't until we were divorced that we became good Catholics again. ↗

— Don Adams

#awfully #became #been #catholics #church