Quotes from Brian D. McLaren

Some of them moved to the desert or wilderness, seeking to create monastic communities where faith expressing itself in love could be experimented with as the norm. Others formed schools and missions or launched new congregations, orders, and movements, translating their spiritual breakthrough into compassionate organizing and action.

Traditional theologians use another word for solidarity: incarnation

What identity is more fraught with self-delusion and unacknowledged wrongdoing than American citizenship?

need to renounce my citizenship?4

But to feel both innocent and superior because of my innocence doesn't seem terribly innocent.

knowing that people may not want to hear what I really feel needs to be written

will eventually find myself an isolated misanthrope

Enter faith, and a whole new factor enters the equation. Words like "impossible" seem out of place. Despair and cynicism feel like insults to God. Hope grows, and love, and therefore motivation to care, to give, to act, to try, to dream, to risk.

In fact, it's hard to find an arena of public life where the innocence formula isn't a factor, providing a fast and easy shortcut to both purity and superiority.

I do know this about pride: pride is tiring, a cruel task-master, a complicator, a destroyer. Humility, in contrast, relaxes, refreshes, relieves, simplifies, renews. To the degree that becoming childlike includes becoming humble, humility releases childlike play, laughter, sleep, smiles, fun. Our pride forces us to take ourselves so seriously, which leads us to take others less seriously and God less seriously still.

globalism (for better or worse) transforms personal and ethnic identities, creating hyphenated and cosmopolitan identities—in which people consider themselves first and foremost citizens of the earth and members of the earth's ecosystem more than as citizens of a nation or members of a religion. This identity disruption creates fissures and fractures among existing elites who are still managing parochial national, cultural, ethnic, or religious systems.11

helping human nature and society mature in their moral and spiritual development, evolving in the direction of nonviolence and love before it's too late.

Being able to know and feel what Karl knows and feels… that no matter what, I am God's, and God is mine… that we have a connection; we have a relationship. Faith in your life brings God in your life.

If enough individuals are full of despair and anger in their hearts, there will be violence in the streets. If enough individuals are full of greed and fear in their hearts, there will be pollution in the rivers and toxins in the air. If enough individuals are full of supremacy and privilege in their hearts, there will be racism and oppression in society. You can't remove the external social symptoms without treating the corresponding internal personal diseases. But

Why can't we admit that focusing on getting our words and beliefs right has not succeeded in helping us be good?

If, for you, orthodox means finally "getting it right" or "getting it straight," mine is a pretty disappointing, curvy orthodoxy. But if, for you, orthodoxy isn't a list of correct doctrines, but rather the doxa in orthodoxy, which means "thinking" or "opinion," then the lifelong pursuit of expanding thinking and deepening, broadening opinions about God sounds like a delight, a joy.

a patriarchal religion with a violent past it has yet to acknowledge and address, a haven for authoritarian leaders and the followers who serve them, happy to exploit the labor and enjoy the adulation of women, people of color, and sexual minorities, but defiant against accepting them as equal partners in ministry.

God unleashes history in the beginning. God helps the baby to stand in the beginning. But God is also out ahead, calling history homeward across the field or across the room. God doesn't force it. Sometimes history responds, or some parts of history respond, but others resist or rebel. But God keeps calling.

The new dimensions of the message are examples of the Spirit of truth doing what Jesus promised he would do: continuing

Actually, maybe the problem is not us. Maybe the problem is Christianity. Maybe the product doesn't perform according to its advertising. Maybe there's something wrong with the religion itself, at least in its current form.

seeing history in this new way-not just being pushed from the past, or even engineered in the present, but being pulled, invited, called, into the future, which keeps coming to us as a gift.

I have a confession to make.121 Almost every time I tune in to religious radio or TV, I want to change my religion. I

have no hope for the church reforming or renewing. My only hope is that it collapses and dies soon, before it does too much more harm, so something new can be resurrected." Others had hope for renewal but talked in terms of centuries, not years or even decades. Latter-Day Saints, Adventists, Unitarians, and many others have reached out to me about their similar spiritual frustrations in their unique contexts.

Locate an evil, and you'll find the love of money at or near the root of it.