Katie Pezzutto > Katie's Quotes

“Theology that is not in touch with [the marginalized's] life experience cannot be living theology.”
― Jung Young Lee, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology

“In light of the original gospel story of Sophia’s envoy and prophet, it becomes clear that the heart of the problem [a historically devastating androcentric hermenutic] is not that Jesus was a man but that more men are not like Jesus, insofar as patriarchy defines their self-identity and relationships.”
― Elizabeth Johnson (She Who Is)

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
― Thomas Merton

“Sometimes our interpretations of the Bible say more about us than they do about the Bible itself.”
― Linda Kay Klein

“For a long time I looked for you within myself, and crept into the shell of my soul, protecting myself with an armour of unapproachability. But you were outside–outside myself–and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart and into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others.”
― Jürgen Moltmann

“If we want to learn anything, we must start with the cosmos, the Earth, and life forms. Love begins as an allurement-as attraction... When we look at love from a cosmic perspective, we see attraction operating at every level...Love begins there. To become fascinated, to feel allurement, is to step into a wold love affair on any level of life.”
― Brian Swimme "The Universe is a Green Dragon"

“Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“the Church should be the place where a word reverberates right into the world.”
― Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline

“Images of the Holy easily become holy images -- sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leads all previous idea of the Messiah in ruins.”
― C.S. Lewis

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping everything intact, you must give your heart to no one...It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
― C.S. Lewis

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.”
― Jonas Mekas

“Theology is not merely a repetition of God's word in a vacuum but a reflection on God's Word in relation to contemporary realities. Theology is thus simultaneously engaged in two related quests. It is a quest for an understanding of the various Biblical doctrines within a particular culture and a questioning of that culture in terms of Biblical faith.”
― Charles Villa-Vicencio, The Spirit of Freedom: South African Leaders on Religion and Politics

“The great objection brought against Christianity in our time, and the real source of the distrust which insulates entire blocks of humanity from the influence of the Church has nothing to do with historical or theological difficulties. It is the suspicion that our religion makes its followers inhuman .”
― Teilhard de Chardin

“God is wonderfully different from what our natural thinking tells us, for this God delights in social existence, ecstatic dance, creativity and spontaneity. This is why we humans love to play in the midst of the seriousness of ordinary life—play bespeaks eternity.”
― Clark H. Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit

“It is a loss to the prayer-life of the whole congregation when parents have to take crying children out or feel under pressure to do so. For ten or fifteen minutes at least, their cries can become our prayers of intercession. As young children laugh or giggle, let us listen and try to re-capture the sheer unspoilt enjoyment in the world and its absurdities--even those who minister. Let our laughter help us to laugh before God. As slightly older children ask questions or make comments in loud voices, let us not hush them but think about what they have said: let their questions, asked without the slightest worry of appearing foolish, become our questions to God in prayer, for God showed the greatest truth through a cross which seemed to the wise to be sheer foolishness.”
― Paul Fiddes