Quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor

religious illiteracy is a luxury they can no longer afford. This is a new idea for them—that illiteracy might be a problem in religion as well as English—or that a religion class might have life applications beyond going to church.

The wind smelled like the moon. I went up there so many times in the weeks that followed that I no longer remember which night it was that God finally answered my prayer. I do not think it was right at the beginning, when I was still saying my prayers in words. I think it came later, when I had graduated to inchoate sounds. Up on that fire escape, I learned to pray the way a wolf howls. I learned to pray the way that Ella Fitzgerald sang scat.

I and everything I love have come forth from the furnace of the stars by a process so full of unfathomable, life-giving grace that my earlier worrying strikes me as cheap.

how do we develop the courage to walk in the dark if we are never asked to practice?

The miracle is not to walk on water but on the earth. —Thich Nhat Hanh

To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live.

To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.

One of the quietest revolutions in Religion 101 follows a student's recognition that he or she has a worldview, a particular way of viewing reality that it is not the only way. A worldview is a wave, but not the entire ocean.

The faith that had sustained them through their middle years had gotten as tight as their old clothes. Their views of God, scripture, the church, and the world were all under renovation.

How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?

religion is more than a source of conflict or a calculated way to stay out of hell. Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia.

Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.

when we run from darkness, how much do we really know about what we are running from? If we turn away from darkness on principle, doing everything we can to avoid it because there is simply no telling what it contains, isn't there a chance that what we are running from is God?

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, "People of the Book risk putting the book above people.

Most of us do not live especially holy lives, after all. We spend most of our time sitting in traffic, paying bills, and being irritated with one another. Yet every week we are invited to stop all of that for one hour at least. We are invited to participate in a great drama that has been going on without us for thousands of years, and one that will go on as long as there is a single player left standing.

Once, at the end of a field trip to the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, the imam ended his meeting with students by saying, 'Our deepest desire is not that you become Muslim, but that you become the best Christian, the best Jew, the best person you can be. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Thank you for coming.' Then he was gone, leaving me with a fresh case of holy envy.

This is worrisome, not only because he is reading a translation from the original Hebrew or Greek that has already involved a great deal of interpretation, but also because it is such a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger of God.

In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.

While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them, becoming more and more cut off from the world at large, those who are willing to wrestle with angels break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most.

When this young priest received my news with grace instead of anger, he reminded me that salvation is not something that happens only at the end of a person's life. Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you," he said, "by the grace of God.

When I wake up in the morning," E. B. White once wrote, "I can't decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day.

Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?