Quotes from Shane Claiborne

I had become a "believer," but I had no idea what it means to be a follower. People had taught me what Christians believe, but no one had told me how Christians live.

What if I had not believed that I should see the goodness of the LORD : in the land of the living! O tarry and await the LORD's pleasure; be strong, and he shall comfort your heart : wait patiently for the LORD.

A friend just told us that perhaps we should relate to the church as a dysfunctional parent. We honor, submit to, and love her. But we do not allow her to destroy those we love with her dysfunction. We recognize that our beauty and our brokenness are inseparable from hers. The Creator and the church are our parents, and having one without the other leaves us very empty. Though our mother has many illegitimate children, we still love her.

Some Christians take so few risks it's no wonder folks have a hard time believing in Heaven. Most of us live in such fear of death that it's as if no one really believes in resurrection anymore.

If we believe terrorists are beyond redemption, then we can rip out half of our New Testament since it was written by a converted terrorist who became an extremist for grace.

Being in proximity makes a difference. Relationships make issues real and complicated and personal. Relationships move us from ideology to compassion. We can't love our neighbor if we don't know them. And once we are proximate, love requires us to take action, to stand up for life in tangible ways.

St. Augustine: "The Church is a whore, but she's my mother." She is a mess and has many illegitimate children. But she is also our momma and managed to give birth to us and to give us enough of the truth that we have been able to ask the questions that we have in this book.

The American flag has smothered the glory of the cross. Many people can't see the beauty of the cross because everything the American flag represents to them is in the way.

Lord, give us the imagination to dream and catch glimpses of the life you intend for us to live. Show us how our individual lives are entwined with those around us, and help us to live so truly together that we embody your good news in this world. Amen.

If you have the gift of frustration and the deep sense that the world is a mess, thank God for that; not everyone has that gift of vision.

There is a place for good food and beautiful art; what matters is who you share it with. What's just as important as what you eat is who you are eating with. One of my favorite sayings these days is "Simple living does not mean ugly living." We can live in ways that are simple and responsible—and beautiful.

We can do more together than we can do alone.

Augustine of Hippo: "In affliction, then, we do not know what it is right to pray for. Because affliction is difficult, troublesome and against the grain for us, weak as we are, we do what every human would do. We pray that it may be taken away from us. However, if he does not take it away, we must not imagine that he has forgotten us. In this way, power shines forth more perfectly in weakness.

Our tools have "advanced," but we haven't advanced spiritually or morally. And so we, normal people, with the tools of destruction and wastefulness available daily for purchase, cannot handle the power.

Over and over, the dying and the lepers would whisper the mystical word namaste in my ear. We really don't have a word like it in English (or even much of a Western conception of it). They explained to me that namaste means "I honor the Holy One who lives in you." I knew I could see God in their eyes. Was it possible that I was becoming a Christian, that in my eyes they could catch a glimpse of the image of my Lover?

As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness. Could we learn to feel again?

such a brutal way of killing someone that it gave birth to the word "excruciating.

The worlds of poverty and wealth collided, and I guess I felt a little dose of what the experts call culture shock. According to Mother Teresa, it is among the wealthy that we can find the most terrible poverty of all— loneliness. So perhaps I was still among the poorest of the poor, but these poor folks had some cash!

Desmond Tutu, a South African bishop and leader in the movement to end apartheid, said, "I don't preach a social gospel; I preach the gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, 'Now is that political or social?' He said, 'I feed you.' Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.

You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too…[And he paused in the awkward silence.] But I guess that's why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.

Sometimes I was incredibly frustrated and angry, wondering how these extremes could exist in the same world, let alone in the same church. Sometimes I just got cynical. That was the easiest thing to feel, as cynicism takes very little energy.

Ammon Hennacy, a Catholic Worker, said, "Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual.

us stand up both to the demons that hide behind ungodly laws, and the false religion that props up injustice. Make us into a people who shine out your love so that the world might know another way is possible. Amen.

True generosity is measured not by how much we give away but by how much we have left, especially when we look at the needs of our neighbors. We have no right not to be charitable. The early Christians taught that charity is merely returning what we have stolen. In the seventeenth century, St. Vincent de Paul said that when he gives bread to the beggars, he gets on his knees and asks forgiveness from them.