Quotes from John D. Caputo

And, increasingly, these culture wars are wars, in which, as an old friend of mine said, the religious right say they are protected by the blood of the Lamb, but they still need their guns. God deserves better. God has fallen into the wrong hands. Religion has made itself unbelievable, an enemy of common sense, science, and democratic life, and is well on its way to shaming God out of existence.

Today, religion in the empirical sense—the word and the thing—is more and more the recourse of the reactionary, the resentful, the undereducated, the anti-scientific, an alibi for white supremacism and sexism, packing its guns, standing its ground against immigrants and people who look different, instead of welcoming "the widow, the orphan, and the stranger," as the prophets enjoin.

The task is not to explain the being of the world but to interpret our place in the world based upon what we know about the world at the time, which is what is what the authors of the scriptures were doing and why we have to start all over again in every new age.

Death is a difficulty, but it is not a punishment for the wrongdoings of our first parents; life is difficult, but it is not a trial through which we must pass to earn an eternal reward. Mortality is not a wounding disability but the enabling condition that lends life its intensity, tenderness, poignancy, and beauty, let us say its wounded glory, the difficult glory, that has tasted the bitter truth.

If we remove the dulling effects of the nineteen centuries that had passed, and make ourselves contemporaries with Christ and his little band of apostles, we might restore the difficulty, the trauma, the great paradox of Christ's appearance which requires us to fit together both a divine and a human nature, the creator of the universe and the babe born in a manger.