Quotes from Robin Meyers

Countless Christians have mouthed these lines in worship for centuries: "Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…" Look carefully at what separates the birth of Christ from his death. The world's greatest life is reduced to a comma.

Or that Ayn Rand and Jesus are truly strange bedfellows? Why can't we say this? Because we are afraid. Why are we afraid? Because we care too much about what people think of us, and not enough about whether we say what needs to be said at a time like this.

The peddling of fear in any form as incentive to faith remains the most egregious sin that can be committed in the name of Jesus. It feels very good to name the enemy and thank God that you are not like "those people." But if Christianity is to survive, someone needs to stand up in the middle of one of these hapless sermons and quote the comic-strip character Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us.

So when Republicans urge self-reliance for the poor and then fail to raise the minimum wage year after year as the cost of living rises, they are engaged in a cruel form of hypocrisy. When they cut programs that provide child care and job training to give more money to billionaires, they are revising the whole concept of compassion. By their actions, they are rewriting the text: "We will guarantee that the poor you shall have with you always.

When I was a kid growing up, the message "Jesus is the Answer" was ubiquitous— painted on barns, outcroppings of rock, or as the final installment of a Burma Shave sign. The message, however, is distinctly unbiblical. The message should be "Jesus is the Assignment.

The answer is: all of us who care about the Gospel. The ministry of Jesus was never based on what someone deserved. There is never a questionnaire given out in advance of a healing.

As for gifted preachers, I like a smooth voice in the pulpit as much as anyone. But there are times when I would prefer some gravel, some red-faced stammering, even a little public anguish from a preacher who has tasted the bread of heaven and lifted the cup of kindness and now feels a little drunk for justice.

If we allow ourselves to be intimidated in our search for truth by the gatekeepers of empire—the billionaires who are now buying up all our newspapers and television stations in order to report from the corporate mountaintop news that is so fake that a whole generation now gets its real news from fake news programs, then we are all wandering in the wilderness. By the way, would that more preachers of the gospel had the fearlessness of Jon Stewart.

If we don't exhibit a basic respect for the sacred in all living things, including our enemies (which is the real definition of "pro-life"), then we have done more than change the DNA structure of what it means to be an American. We have mangled it when it comes to being a Christian.

His scientific community will reject him for believing in God. Unless, of course, someone challenges the biggest enthymeme of them all that they are not separate realms to begin with just separate methods in search of the same unified mystery.

Fundamentalists of all stripes love a bully pulpit but hate a roundtable. Why share power when you are right and everyone else is wrong? Who needs dialogue when your monologue is sacrosanct? Why let false prophets into the room when you can bolt the door and preach to the choir?

Thus the fundamental illusion from which we must be disentangled, or "undone," is that the proper definition of the life of faith itself is first and foremost a belief system with behavioral consequences, rather than a way of being in the world whose behavior consequences make clear the things we believe. In other words, we are not acting upon beliefs so much as we are believing through action—we are not believers who act but actors who believe.

America is going fascist, and it's doing so with the help of religious zealots whose real passion is for the politics of privilege, not the radically disturbing presence of Jesus. This will sound alarmist to some, but the truth is that no country ever thinks it is going fascist until it wakes up one day to that indisputable reality. Then the people will say, "How did this happen?" And the answer is "one day at a time, and with the blessing of the church.

With every passing year, as the end of my own life draws nearer, there seems to be an ever-shrinking distance between the utterly mundane and the gloriously transcendent. Even my neighborhood at dawn is a burning bush.

America is one of the last places left on earth where every citizen, until the day he or she dies, is exposed to the risk of personal bankruptcy because of illness or disease. It does not matter how industrious we are, how carefully we save and invest, or how moral we are in our personal and family life. We are all just one long hospital stay away from losing everything.

It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not "trying to be a contemplative," or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this. —THOMAS MERTON

It is a victory for the empire, but not for the kingdom of God, that if you are "too big to fail" it means that your rewards are privatized but your risks are socialized. You can gamble with other people's money, and if you win, you win. But if you lose, we lose. I don't know what economic model that is, but it's not God's economy, so I say, for the love of God … RESIST!

If there are rules against taking advantage of resident aliens, then why are so many Christians the first to call for deportation of migrants? It's as if we expect these strangers to provide us with cheap manual labor, roofing our houses, landscaping our yards, pouring concrete, and caring for our children, but then we want them to disappear after sundown.

To the best-selling atheists of our time, who have lumped us all together into one ridiculous religious cartoon and then proudly announce that they don't believe in the God that most of us don't believe in either, I say, for the love of God … RESIST!

Because there is no fight like a church fight, all hell broke loose.