Life After Doom Quotes

“Conventional capitalism—by which I mean the economic story that upholds our current global civilization—acts as if the economy is the ultimate reality, the invisible hand that guides human history. It tells us who we are: abstracted consumers with wants and needs that the economy can fulfill. It provides ultimate justice, rewarding the hardworking and punishing the lazy. It either ignores social injustice or promises that its own invisible hand will resolve it.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart

“When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them—and that is of course because they fully accept the system and identify themselves with it. —Contemplative monk Thomas Merton1”
― Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart

“Poetry and the arts—like the right kind of prayer—can help us to stay with grief long enough to feel its sweetness, long enough for the sweetness and grief to deepen our sensitivity to the exquisite agony and ecstasy that we call appreciation, praise, love … and life.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart

“Those who aim for interdependence know that the only way through tough times is together.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart

“The tipping point of faith is the threshold of spiritual energy, where what we believe becomes what we do.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart

“If you “get” that last sentence, you’ll probably feel as I do right now as I write: we live in between two impending dangers, both real, both potential threats to our existence. To our left, we face the frightening gradual accumulation of environmental and social consequences of ecological overshoot. To our right, we face the more sudden social consequences of having our terror management strategies fail, plunging us and our neighbors into our most reactive, most neurotic, and least rational behaviors right at a time when we need cool heads and a collaborative spirit.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart

“both hope and hopelessness can have a surprisingly similar appeal. First, both relieve us from the uncertainty of an unknown future. For one, a happy ending is assumed; for the other, a tragic ending is inescapable. Either way, at least we know what’s coming. Second, both promise us a future that asks nothing of us.”
― Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart

“We didn’t raise ethical objections when we heard the cries of the Earth and the cries of the poor. Instead, we let our theology conveniently turn our attention to what happened after we died,”
― Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart