Quotes from Brian D. McLaren

Cause-effect looks back and asks, "What caused this?" Purpose looks up or ahead, and asks, "And why was it caused? For what purpose? For what end?" Cause-effect looks for a force pushing events from behind. Purpose looks for a pattern or design or intention or meaning pulling events from ahead, guiding them from above, enriching them from within.

Because I follow Jesus, then, I am bound to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, atheists, New Agers, everyone (even religious broadcasters, I was just reminded by a still, small voice). Not only am I bound to them in love, but I am also actually called to, in some real sense (please don't minimize this before you qualify it), become one of them, to enter their world and be with them in it.

To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart—that's what life is about, that's its task. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letters

You may be frustrated to see how susceptible to authoritarianism people in these early stages are, especially because, as C. S. Lewis famously quipped, they may be as willing to kill for their faith as die for it.

there is no way to peace, but rather peace itself is the way to life in God's kingdom. (This

We must, therefore, never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God—whether in prose or in poetry. Romano

A generous orthodoxy is like that. It acknowledges that we're all a mess. It sees in our worst failures the possibility of our deepest repentance and God's opening for our most profound healing. It remembers Jesus' parable that wherever God sows good seed, "an enemy" will sow weed seeds. It realizes that you can't pull up the bad without uprooting the good too, and so it refrains from judging. It just rejoices wherever good seed grows.

I'm often asked if I have hope for Christianity. These days, I say, "My hope for Christianity depends on my hope for humanity, and we humans are not trending well." And in that realization, I find a compelling reason to stay Christian.

Roman throats like the Zealots. Instead, if a Roman soldier backhands you with a blow

Protestants had a special appetite for witch trials; over 90 percent of the trials took place in Protestant lands.

trust in the process is another way of saying to trust in an intelligence wiser than current human intelligence

and writhe in tension, pulling you in two directions, leaving you in di-stress.

For some of us, faith is a fortress of certainty we will defend to the death. For others, faith is a prison to leave behind forever.

if you and I do not stay Christian, if we give up whatever little voice and influence we have inside the larger Christian community, won't we be an answer to the misguided prayers of the religious company men and their followers, who want the rest of us gone?

Instead, it was a Christianity engaged with modernity (and postmodernity) — grappling with its issues, sensitive to its questions and concerns, aware of its spiritual vacuum, in vital dialogue with its artistic and intellectual leaders. It was a "third-way" faith seeking to steer a course that would avoid defensive retreat and isolation on the one hand and capitulation and sellout on the other.

Support every positive change in every micro-movement and institution.

They must constantly negotiate among their own moral and spiritual instincts, the interests of their institutions, their personal concerns about their own salaries and retirement accounts, and professional and social status. In short, they must master the art of ethical compromise as a matter of vocational survival

For Watts, then, while faith is unreserved openness to the truth—a refusal to reduce truth to what we already understand, beliefs are ideas we cling to because we wish they were true or want them to be true.

This papal document—which has not yet been repudiated by the Catholic Church—was the basis for the Christian justification of colonialism and the building of competitive Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, Belgian, German, and other Euro-Christian empires that spanned the world.13 It was the genocide card that was given to every white Christian nation.

Schoolchildren don't normally learn this poem about Columbus's second voyage to Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today): "In fourteen hundred and ninety-five, sixteen hundred people he kidnapped alive." Columbus

I don't think we should give up on ritual. I don't think we should give up on any possible means of experiencing God.

The people of Hispaniola had their lives unjustly and savagely taken by professed Jesus followers, and they were not, as we all know, the only ones to meet such a fate. Millions of their Indigenous sisters and brothers on Turtle Island were killed at the hands of other Europeans, as nation after imperial nation, bearing Christ on their lips and crosses on their military standards, followed suit.21

As the Navajo and Christian activist Mark Charles explains, when citizens of the thirteen British colonies composed the Declaration of Independence, among their complaints against King George was that he didn't allow them to apply the Doctrine of Discovery to the people of the lands to their west.22 The Declaration described the indigenous peoples as "merciless Indian savages," clearly not counted among the "all men" whom God supposedly "created equal.

Christianity was like McDonald's, I concluded: the menu was limited and predictable, but its familiarity felt as comforting as a cheeseburger. What it lacked in nourishment it made up for in convenience.