“Any observer would have to say that Christianity is fashionable at present in the United States. This might be a good thing, except that the observer, observing more closely, would have to conclude that, to the extent that Christianity is fashionable, it is loosely fashionable. It seems to have remarkably little to do with the things that Jesus Christ actually taught.

Especially among Christians in positions of great wealth and power, the idea of reading the gospels and keeping Jesus‘s commandments, as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective ‘Christian.’”

Wendell Berry
Christianity society social justice christ Belief action wealth power Faith

“God is not a Christian. God accepts as pleasing those who live by the best lights available to them that they can discern. All truth, all sense of beauty, all awareness of goodness has one source, God, who is not confined to one place, time or people.”

Desmond Tutu
God Faith Good beauty search Christianity Seeking truth love

"I think this nation should be, for the foreseeable future, in mourning; one must face the fact that this Christian nation may never have read any of the Gospels, but they do understand money."

James Baldwin
nationalism gospel Faith money Christianity

"Christ’s death was not a ransom, or a penal substitution, or a penal example; it was a revelation of the sacrificial love of God intended to awaken an answering love in the human heart."

Martin Luther King Jr.
love substitutionary atonement God redemption Jesus revelation christ Christianity

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going,
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

Thomas Merton
certainty unknown God Faith Fear desire Christianity

"It is very difficult for me to explain that the more enchanted I become with the person and teaching of Christ, the farther away I feel from all institutional Christianity."

Malcolm Muggeridge
Faith christ institutions Christianity

"For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world.  It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence.  That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle we really get."

Frederick Buechner
God Faith incarnation presence suffering miracle Christianity

“'Christ is in all things.' I’ve been accused of being a pantheist. . . I’m a panENtheist. The Christian word for that is incarnationalism, the manifestation of the divine through the natural, physical, and human world. It’s a Christ-soaked world."

Richard Rohr
Christianity Jesus creation environment

"Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed."

Dorothy Day
Poor Christianity Jesus

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here."

Wendell Berry
Jesus religion Christianity church