The American Spiritual Culture Quotes

“Whether it is Paul defending Judaism, Augustine pursing philosophical learnedness, Luther attempting complete ritual self-abasement, each finally realized he had given himself to secular forms of self-salvation and to a world filled with human achievement but empty of God.”
― William Dean, The American Spiritual Culture: And the Invention of Jazz, Football, and the Movies

“By normal standards, Jesus' modus operandi was virtually an atheistic modus operandi, so that he could live through the irony of atheism, first divesting himself of a standard theism, then undergoing an ironic reversal toward a new theism.”
― William Dean, The American Spiritual Culture: And the Invention of Jazz, Football, and the Movies

“First, any term applied to God is only ana analogy; when this is forgotten, any God-defining term is sacrilegious.”
― William Dean, The American Spiritual Culture: And the Invention of Jazz, Football, and the Movies

“Wright's point was that the God of the Israelites is not the God who speaks, if speaking is a means of conveying a word that can be dissociated from acts, and thereby "dissociated from history and dealt with as an abstraction" for theological contemplation.”
― William Dean, The American Spiritual Culture: And the Invention of Jazz, Football, and the Movies