Rick Lee Lee James > Rick Lee's Quotes

“Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”
― Wendell Berry, Farming: A Hand Book

“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

“Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.

Her response was, “If it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.”
― Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

“Beauty will save the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“What about God? The idea embarrassed him. It was only in moments of absolute fear that he had ever thought about God and prayed to him, always embarrassed because he did not believe and felt so hypocritical when he prayed out of fear, as if in spite of his disbelief there might be God after all, God who could be fooled by a hypocrite. When he was a child, then he believed. He certainly did believe when he was a child. How did it go, the nightly Act of Contrition? The words came hesitantly, unfamiliarly to him. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for—For what?”
― David Morrell, First Blood

“Fasting is the only method of suicide permitted by the Catholic Church. All other ways imply despair, a distrust of God’s wisdom, an unwillingness to bear the hardships with which God tests his children. An absolute sin, suicide’s punishment is eternal damnation in the fires of Hell. But fasting is undertaken for the purpose of penance, meditation, and spiritual ecstasy. It purifies the spirit by denying the body. It brings a soul closer to God.”
― David Morrell, The Brotherhood Of The Rose

“Hey, what about you? That monastery didn’t make you soft, I hope.” “The Cistercians?” Chris laughed. “Make me soft? They’re the toughest order in the Catholic Church.” “They really don’t talk?” “Not only that. They believe in brutal daily work. I might as well have spent another six years in Special Forces.”
― David Morrell, The Brotherhood Of The Rose

“The same is true about husbands being the “spiritual heads” of their households (not one verse says that), about Sunday and not Saturday being Christians’ set-apart day of rest and worship (just ask Seventh Day Adventists),”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“Or take the belief common among some evangelicals that every individual needs an identifiable point of personal faith conversion to create a “personal relationship with Jesus.” That’s certainly a key to evangelical revivalism, and one can definitely find various Bible verses that seem to buttress such a claim. But, altogether, the direct biblical evidence for that theology and rhetoric is in fact pretty thin.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“Protestant insistence on the written word in the Bible as the only and sufficient Christian authority for faith and practice relies on an impossible anachronism that artificially projects a modern standard of authority and means of knowledge conveyance retrospectively back into a pre-modern reality that operated by different but reliable and legitimate standards.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“How much stronger and healthier might the Body of Christ be if it was not torn into pieces? How powerful and vibrant could the Church become if in unity all of today’s separated evangelicals and other Protestants brought together in it all of their gifts, talents, energies, and devotion? We are so used to division that that is almost unimaginable.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“First, the Deuterocanonical books Baruch, Tobit, Maccabees, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom and parts of Daniel and Esther were all included in the Septuagint that Jesus and the apostles read as Scripture. Second, the New Testament itself in at least some and possibly many places references Deuterocanonical books. Heb 11:35b, for example, references 2 Macabees 7:1–19. First Peter 1:6–7 references Wisdom 3:5–6 and Sirach 2:5. First Peter 1:17 references Sirach 16:12. Numerous other similar instances can be found.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“Catholics actually think about prayer a little differently than evangelicals. Prayer is not simply praise and intercession. Prayer is, first of all, “the raising of one’s mind and heart to God” (Catechism 2559). Prayer can also involve “the requesting of good things from God.” But more fundamentally, “prayer is the living relationship of the children of God with their Father who is good beyond measure, with his Son Jesus Christ, and with the Holy Spirit. . . . Thus, the life of prayer is the habit of being in the presence of the thrice-holy God and in communion with him”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“The Catholic Church does not offer certainty in human knowledge in the way that some ex-evangelicals seem to want to have it. So forget about that. Learn, have faith, seek understanding, and be prepared to give an account. Be forgiven and forgive. Be formed by the sacraments and practices of the Church, particularly the Eucharist, and learn Christian love for God and your neighbor. That’s it.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“Why stash little ones away in a nursery downstairs with volunteers, who are hard to recruit and who themselves then miss the service, when they can actually be part of God’s people in worship? This can make it hard sometimes when children are acting up. But it keeps families together.”
― Christian Smith, How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps

“Jesus, they claim, is God: “God from God.” If you need an analogy, the next phrase serves. It’s like light. How can you separate light from light? You can’t. (This was a traditional example in early Christian writings, usually concerning the ray of the sun and the sun itself.) Neither can the Father and the Son be separated.”
― Justin S. Holcomb, Know the Creeds and Councils

“The political struggles of Ephesus can pose a problem for modernday believers. Even if denominations might differ on how difficult theological questions are resolved, it seems obvious that they should not be resolved the way that those at Ephesus were — with underhanded political tactics and a refusal to understand the points of the other side. The fact that one of the major councils of the church seems to depend just as much on politics as theology can be disturbing — can we be sure that the church made the right decision? Are the beliefs that we hold today the result of careful interpretation of Scripture, or the machinations of powerful figures? It is helpful to remember that the story of redemption in the Bible relies on people who deliberately did evil things — Samson, Saul, and David are excellent examples. When Jesus came, however, it became apparent that God not only had accounted for human failing but had even made it a part of his plan for the salvation of the world; as Joseph says to his brothers in Genesis 50:20, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” Because God is able to work through human failings as well as in spite of them, Christianity does not need to rely on a whitewashed version of history.”
― Justin S. Holcomb, Know the Creeds and Councils

“The Spirit of holiness and love is also the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge about love; and they are in fact one and the same Spirit: “Truth and love are inseparable wings—for truth cannot fly without love—and love cannot hover without truth”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible

“[God loves us, not such as we are by our merit, but such as we will be by his own gift]”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible

“For slandering someone in a song, for instance, the penalty was to be clubbed to death.”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“It is simply anachronistic to divide ancient motivations into the religious and the political. They were tangled up together. For us, the state is—in theory—exclusively political and should not interfere in questions of personal belief, religion, faith, or God. In reality religion and politics are thoroughly entangled with one another, but we idealize the separation of church and state and the freedom of individuals to practice their religious traditions. For ancient Romans the state”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“There are people out there who’ve paid good money to hear me. I always figure when all you got is the deposit slip, you better be real nice to the folks that have the checkbook.”
― Thomas Cobb, Crazy Heart: A Novel

“no single principle can account for the unity of the New Testament writings; instead, we need a cluster of focal images to govern our construal of New Testament ethics.”
― Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

“Theology is for Paul never merely a speculative exercise; it is always a tool for constructing community.”
― Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

“the church is to find its identity and vocation by recognizing its role within the cosmic drama of God’s reconciliation of the world to himself.”
― Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

“To live faithfully in the time between the times is to walk a tightrope of moral discernment, claiming neither too much nor too little for God’s transforming power within the community of faith.”
― Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics