Quotes from Diana Butler Bass

Doctrine is to be the balm of a healing experience of God, not a theological scalpel to wound and exclude people.

Why is it that the choice among churches always seems to be the choice between intelligence on ice and ignorance on fire?

Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.

Awe is the gateway to compassion. It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world. If we do not like the world or are afraid of it, we have had a hand in that. And if we made a mess, we can clean it up and do better. We are what we make.

The whole message of the Christian scripture is based in the idea of metanoia, the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face. Even a cursory knowledge of history reveals that Christianity is a religion about change. The Christian faith always changes--even when some of its adherents claim that it does not.

That it is precisely when we recognize our common humanity—when we recognize our own humanity in the face of the other—it is then that we also recognize the face of God.

Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspiration and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.

We are safer and happier when we care for each other in community, when we do things for each other.

To transform home is to transform the world.

But some contemporary believers, such as Lisa Domke, a pastor and mother in Seattle, ground their identity in Christ's love but a love that goes beyond sentiment or feeling. "I say that I am someone seeking to live in the world with love and humility," Lisa reports, "following God in the way of Jesus." Love is the active practice of Christian virtue. As Sky, a Seattle Baptist, relates, "Children know that love is behavior, not romantic words.

While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger. Unlike almost every other contested idea in early Christianity, including the nature of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, the unanimous witness of the ancient fathers and mothers was that hospitality was the primary Christian virtue.

Whereas militant Christianity triumphs over all, generative Christianity transforms the world through humble service to all. It is not about victory; it is about following Christ in order to seed human community with grace.

Where do you live?' is ultimately a sacred question.

Universal hospitality. Welcoming all to God's table. A river of justice. Or, as the prophet Isaiah envisioned long ago, "They will not hurt or destroy on my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (Isa. 11:9).

Enacting love was a critical aspect of experiencing love. Devotion and ethics intertwined.

Gratitude is complicated. Feelings of dependence—and interdependence—can be both elusive and resisted, mostly because they are caught up with soul-crushing ideas of obligation and debt. But if gratitude is mutual reliance upon (instead of payback for) shared gifts, we awaken to a profound awareness of our interdependence. Dependence may enslave the soul, but interdependence frees us.

Hospitality is the practice that keeps the church from becoming a club, a members-only society.

Spiritual awakening is not ultimately the work of invisible cultural forces. Instead, it is the work of learning to see differently, of prayer, and of conversion. It is something people do.

While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger.

I'm waiting now, but I will be ready. We are mutual participants, you and I, intertwined.

There is no one experience of gratitude; rather, it is a complex and episodic thing, and one that is deeply personal.

My story can never be your story (that is called colonization—something I hope we are leaving behind). But my story might inform yours, or be like yours, or maybe even add depth or another dimension to yours. If nothing else, sharing our stories might lead to greater understanding, tolerance, appreciation, and perhaps even celebration of our differences.

Gratitude is, however, more than just an emotion. It is also a disposition that can be chosen and cultivated, an outlook toward life that manifests itself in actions—it is an ethic.

Irenaeus of Lyon (ca. 115–202): "The glory of God is the human person fully alive.