Quotes About Church

For black Catholics, the papal visit is a time of anticipation but also a time of reflection on their difficult - but important - place within the Catholic Church in America.

The first trip I can remember would have to be to Marianna, Arkansas. My mother's parents are from there, and we'd go every year to visit the church where they were buried. We'd attend church service that day, put flowers around their tombstones, and visit with family and friends that still lived there.

I do visit the church every Christmas, spend time with family and close friends at dinner.

But I like going to church. If you've been brought up in the Church of England, it feels like visiting an elderly relative. And I think it's important that part of the kids' education is knowing about the Bible.

I never really liked the Gospel of John because I never could find the humanity of Jesus in it. I thought it presented Jesus as a visitor from another planet; in addition, John's gospel is and has been interpreted as a document that fuels anti-Semitism in the church.

You don't go to church and tell the choir how to sing if you're a visitor.

The devil took advantage of Christ's hunger to tempt him to limit his concern to the relief of human need. These are vital concerns, but they cannot be the sole concern of the Church. We need daily bread; we need, too, a reason for living, a sense of purpose, a vision.

My religion is my most precious possession. Except for it, I could easily have become excessively occupied with industry. Sharing responsibility for church work has been a vital counterbalance in my life.

I danced for a while, and I knew I could sing, so I just began singing in a praise band at church and doing musical theater and jazz vocal performance in school. One didn't really lead to another; I was just always interested in the performance arts.

My mother was into church so she listens to gospel music. I like the way gospel is composed... the great vocalist chord and the way they make you feel.

I'm chasing a feeling more than a sound and I try to reflect that in my turns of phrases. Growing up in church, people would get up and sing, and the conviction reflected in their vocals; I try to carry that in my sound.

My mum was very glamorous, an incredible seamstress. She made up those Vogue, Givenchy and Yves St. Laurent patterns they used to sell. It was church couture, darling! Because my dad was a pastor, she could get away with more than other women. Her skirts were that bit tighter.

There needs to be a place in the church or just outside - there needs to be a place where people feel free to ask questions without being put upon, where they feel free to ask difficult, challenging questions to voice their skepticism.

I had always sung, as far back as I can remember, for the pure love of it. My voice was contralto, and I sang in a church in Naples from fourteen till I was eighteen.

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

I solemnly declare that this spiritual kingdom of faith will move forward with or without each of us individually. No unhallowed hand can stay the growth of the Church nor prevent fulfillment of its mission. Any of us can be left behind, drawn away by the seductive voices of secularism and materialism.

I actually started singing in church when I was about five years old. I remember looking at the choirs and just hearing all of those great big beautiful voices. And there was this one woman who could just wail. And I remember trying to sing like her when I was like going home.

When you listen to my music, you hear that there are all these voices going on in different parts of the song. That's because I was always around so many voices in church.

My grandfather was the minister at the Lutheran church. My dad owned a car dealership in town. My mom was the consummate volunteer and cheerleader for me.

The music in Haiti is all tied up in voodoo and African rhythm, and so there's this funny thing: go to a voodoo ceremony, and then go to a Catholic church and tell me which music you liked better, to which one the music is more integral.

People in Northern Ireland vote for their church, they don't vote with their heads; it is ridiculous.

The fact that religion plays such a part in how people vote troubles me, troubles me as a minister's daughter. Because I always felt that the separation of church and state was what our forefathers and foremothers really fought for.

Kennedy believed in religious liberty and the separation of church and state. He did not believe in the right of elected officials to impose their religious views on others. He was the first Catholic ever elected president, and he spent much of the 1960 campaign defending his religion and assuring voters he would not take orders from the Vatican.

The Conservative party's always been a broad church, and I can appeal better than any of the other candidates to the centre ground to unite the country, and to voters who will ultimately deliver a majority so we can really get things moving.