James > James's Quotes

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.
Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm.”
― Robert Farrar Capon

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“You have as much laughter as you have faith.”
― Martin Luther

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.”
― N.T. Wright

“To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Creatures cannot image even the true God in biblical thinking generally speaking. Nevertheless - and here is the extraordinary exception - there ARE "gods" in the world. There ARE images of God placed in a temple. These images are none other than the human beings - ALL human beings - whom God has created and set in his temple-cosmos.”
― Iain Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

“Our public life is largely premised on an exploitation of our common anxiety. The advertising of consumerism and the drives of the acquisitive society, like he serpent, seduce into believing there are securities apart from the reality of God.”
― Walter Brueggemann

“To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can't separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes" (The Way of Jesus, Eugene H. Peterson, 22).”
― Eugene Peterson

“Worship turns out to be the dangerous act of waking up to God and to the purposes of God in the world, and then living lives that actually show it.”
― Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice

“Waking up is the dangerous act of worship. It's dangerous because worship is meant to produce lives fully attentive to reality as God sees it, and that's more
than most of us want to deal with.”
― Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice

“[E]ducation is a holistic endeavor that involves the whole person, including our bodies, in a process of formation that aims our desires, primes our imagination, and orients us to the world -- all before we ever start thinking about it.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“So I say to you, seek God and discover him and make him a power in your life. Without him all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights. Without him, life is a meaningless drama with the decisive scenes missing. But with him we are able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. With him we are able to rise from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy. St. Augustine was right—we were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in him.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., The Measure of a Man

“But when we are faithful to keep ourselves in His holy presence, and set Him always before us, this not only hinders our offending Him and doing anything that may displease Him, at least wilfully, but it also begets in us a holy freedom, and, if I may so speak, a familiarity with God, wherewith we ask, and that successfully, the graces we stand in need of. In”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
― Frederick Douglass

“The Christianity of America is a Christianity, of whose votaries it may be as truly said, as it was of the ancient scribes and Pharisees, 'They bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“If there is no justice for the people, let there be no peace for the government.”
― Emiliano Zapata

“The separation of religion from the practical affairs of society is a convenient doctrine for those who fear that social change would threaten of modify their own political and social self-interest.”
― William Stringfellow, A Private and Public Faith

“People want to feel good. They want to be happy. Scientific studies have shown that when a person smiles or laughs, his endorphins are raised, which makes him feel good. If you are the person who makes him feel that way, he will start to like you and become more likely to do business with you.”
― Marshall Chiles, Your Presentation is a Joke: Using Humor to Maximize Your Impact

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation. ”
― William Blake

“There is more hope in honest brokenness than in the pretense of false wholeness.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci, Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick

“Rather than elevating poverty to a form of righteousness, Jesus is instead calling for a revolution of imagination around the nature of what we consider true blessing.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci, The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis and Life in the Kingdom

“This emphasis is directed primarily at the here and now, as Christ-embodying communities of active love in the midst of the world. All of creation is caught up in the restorative work. The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us—poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction—where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci, Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick

“We celebrate the differences among us, even that which we cannot reconcile, not in denial of the absolute, but in the gift of humility that those differences require of us. Without denying our differences, we no longer allow them to categorize or divide us. It is in the diversity that the image of God is most fully reflected in and through us.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci, Living Christ Together: Reflections On The Missional Life

“Often it is the poor who recognize emptiness before the rest of us—and for obvious reasons. While I am not suggesting that poverty predisposes people to some form of righteousness, I have seen how their circumstances often free them from much of the pretense that our relative privilege affords us. So while the poor are not godlier on the basis of their poverty, they are often at least more authentic in their brokenness, and thus, perhaps, closer to honestly recognizing what true emptiness is.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci, Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick