Quotes About Church

I compare tradition to a water main: the church suffers from the syndrome of rusty piping. If we could look into our subterranean water systems we would never drink water again. And yet they bring us clean water, even when they are rusty.

The reader as a whole reflected, as Bingham intended, New England's long transition from seventeenth-century Calvinism to nineteenth-century evangelical, freewill doctrine, from Puritan theocracy to the Revolutionary era's separation of church and state.

Granted, Catholic sexual teachings are often in the news, but if you think about it, the media rarely reports on what the Church teaches sex is for. Instead, it reports on what the Church teaches sex is not for.

At dawn, a ray of sunlight slanted from the steeple of St. Antoine's church, glanced off a window on Grant Street and finally alighted on a beer can lying in the middle of the pavement.

The elder wife said that the stranger was welcome to the children, but she insisted that they hear nothing of the outside world, and that they be kept to the teachings of the Mormon geography—which made all the world outside Utah an untrodden wilderness. August Naab did not hold to the letter of the Mormon law; he argued that if the children could not be raised as Mormons with a full knowledge of the world, they would only be lost in the end to the Church.

most of 'em goes to church so they'll be sure to rise in Judgment.

brother pastorin' up round Ocala dat

'Greenleaf' has such great affection for the church.

You can't take a kid from north Alabama and growing up in church - some of that is just gonna seep out.

The people I grew up around, almost all of them had been born and raised in the South. And, you know, they didn't always go to church, but they lived their lives as if God were watching everything they did.

I'm a lapsed altar boy.

When you are part of a megachurch, you have no responsibility to anybody else.

The poor man's heart was big with affections seeking an object; he had never been loved but by a poodle that had died some time since, of which he would talk to me, asking whether I thought the Church would allow masses to be said for the repose of its soul. His dog, said he, had been a good Christian, who for twelve years had accompanied him to church, never barking, listening to the organ without opening his mouth,

But in the confessional, or at night, when praying, she wept often, imploring God's forgiveness for the apostasy of the man who thought the contrary of what he professed, and who desired the destruction of the aristocracy and the Church, — the two religions of the house of Cormon.

Often the good saint sat mutely by and listened to the hatred of men who concealed themselves under the cloak of constitutional royalists. She shuddered as she foresaw the ruin of the Church.

The two priests, the chorister, and the beadle came, and said and did as much as could be expected for seventy francs in an age when religion cannot afford to say prayers for nothing.

In the eyes of the Church,' said he, 'adultery is a crime; in those of your tribunals it is a misdemeanor. Adultery drives to the police court in a carriage instead of standing at the bar to be tried. Napoleon's Council of State, touched with tenderness towards erring women, was quite inefficient. Ought they not in this case to have harmonized the civil and the religious law, and have sent the guilty wife to a convent, as of old?

You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.

Ask any of us: What is your concept of God, your understanding of sin or salvation, your account of the nature and purpose of the church, or your Christian view of right and wrong? Caught short by the question, we may come up with a pat answer. This is understandable. Or we may hesitate and stammer, unless we have stopped at some earlier point to consider the matter. And yet our day-to-day decisions are based upon this embedded theology.

MacHaffie, Barbara J. Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. MacHaffie's is a well-respected book focusing on the too-often neglected contributions of women in the church generally, including theology.

So Mr. Jenkins undertook the building of a new place of worship, and, in part under his own hands, an attractive and churchly building arose, costing some $3,000, dedicated to St. John.

The Roman Church has grown and grown, fueled by immigration but also renewed by two pontiffs who have seemed to understand what Tocqueville knew: People want guidance for their souls once they are convinced they have them.

I just find the evangelical church too, well, restrictive. But the School of Practical Philosophy is nonconfrontational. We believe there are many forms of Scripture. What is true is true and will never change, whether it's in the Bible or in Shakespeare. It's about oneness.

The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.