Lisa Sharon Harper > Quotes

“Sin is not about the personal imperfection of the self. Rather, sin is any act that breaks any of the relationships God declared very good in the beginning.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper

“The sabbatical year would greatly hamper Israel’s ability to build an economy that would fuel a dominating empire. If all debts were forgiven every seven years and free labor was set free, the economy would be forced to recalibrate. Here we see God placing boundaries on the world’s capacity to build empire, similar to what God did at the Tower of Babel.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right

“Do I love God? To love God is to trust God, to choose God, and to choose God's way to peace and wholeness.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right

“This is a prayer for Jubilee—that economic system instituted by God when God governed the people of Israel in Leviticus 25:8–55. Jubilee came every forty-nine years. In the fiftieth year, all debt was forgiven, all property returned, all enslaved people set free.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“The far-flung love of Jesus is a direct challenge to the reigning Western supremacist philosophies and governance of the Roman Empire. The Romans were deeply influenced by the Greek philosophers, including Plato, who invented the concept of race. Plato imagined race as the various metals that people groups were made of. Race ordered society, determining how different people groups contribute to the republic.18 Plato’s student Aristotle introduced explicit human hierarchy, arguing in his Politics that some races are created to rule while other races are created to be slaves.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“In 1654, mixed-race Elizabeth Key legally challenged her enslavement on the basis of three points: (1) British law barred the enslavement of British citizens; (2) British common law established the citizenship of the child through the status of the father; and (3) British law barred the enslavement of baptized Christians.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“This is the promise of Genesis 1. The darkness is limited by the light. Suffering is not in perpetuity. The light may take generations to come, but it will come. There is always hope.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right

“True to King’s words, White nationalists attempted to kill democracy because it demanded equality. But they lost.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“The Virginia House of Burgesses was threatened by the prospect of losing legal claim to generations of free labor and incalculable wealth. So it moved to close the loopholes that Key’s case revealed. It passed legislation in 1662 that was modeled after the Roman law of partus sequitur ventrem, which determined the citizenship status of the child according to the status of the mother, not the father. This shift allowed White slaveholders to continue raping enslaved Black women and producing mixed-race free labor with absolute impunity. British masters no longer had to acknowledge their children before the law, so their children had no claim to citizenship under British law. This single law laid the foundation for the legal construct of race in the US.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“We wonder how our nation has come to its present moment. We watch as today’s courtier class—legislators, Fortune 500 businessmen, and celebrities—break every law with impunity. They bilk the system. They pay no taxes. They openly lie and cheat and steal. They even wage war on democracy itself through voter suppression and insurrection. These attacks on the core of American identity are swept under the proverbial rug. This 1662 law broke our nation—even before it began. That is our genesis.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“In every corner of the world, a primary weapon of Western domination has been to cut off indigenous and other subjugated peoples from their lands, from their families and communities, and from the stories that tie them together. Colonization wields four crucial weapons of conquest in its arsenal of mass destruction: genocide, slavery, removal, and rape. These weapons hack people groups apart, separating them from land, people, story, and identity. These weapons yield for colonizers more land for production of wealth, fewer foes to threaten wealth, and low-cost or no-cost labor to grow wealth.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“Within one generation you will be in the minority in the United States as well. When that day comes, you can wage war or you can lean into truth, lean into repentance and repair, and allow yourselves to be released—forgiven.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“Finally, for this exercise, fill a cup with water and consider the biblical image of well water. Imagine that the water in your cup is well water. What does the well water in your cup represent? In what areas of your life are you drinking water that leaves you thirstier than you were before you drank it? Now consider the image of living water. What might it look like to replace your well water with God’s living water? If you’re ready, dump out your well water. Let it go. Close your eyes and hold your empty cup in front of you. Say this simple prayer: “Fill me.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right

“Most Texan children are never taught that Austin imagined Texas as a slaveholding province of Mexico and incentivized new settlers to bring more slaves by offering more land if they did.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“God charges the Hebrews again and again to remember that they were once enslaved in Egypt. This is the source of their humility—this is their grounding memory. People of European descent in the US lack such humility because they lack such memory. They have come to believe they are actually White, but Whiteness is a phantom.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“General family systems theory says that anytime any one individual in the family is affected by something, it sends a ripple through the whole family.”1 This understanding of the family is seen at the heart of the biblical concept of shalom. Injustice to any part of creation affects the whole. Likewise, there is no peace for the whole unless there is peace for each part. So the wellness of each family member benefits the whole. The same is true across generations.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right

“The world cracked apart the moment the first European explorers looked at indigenous people who had stewarded land for thousands of years and declared them “uncivilized” and therefore unfit to exercise stewardship of their lands—or themselves.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“At the heart of the very good news of the gospel is the reversal of the Fall. With that reversal, Jesus’s death and resurrection paved the way for patriarchy to be crushed. This made way for the full acknowledgment of the image of God in women and men.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right

“In the wake of the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, formerly colonized peoples and nations marched for justice around the world. They recognized the knee on Floyd’s neck as the same knee on theirs through the systems of colonization, enslavement, exploitative “apprenticeship” in the Caribbean, Jim Crow in the US, and apartheid in South Africa.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“Aristotle did not understand race to be determined by the color of a people group’s skin, but he did understand it to be a determining factor of intelligence and whether a people group was “supreme” (his language) or created to be enslaved.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“given the deteriorating state of life on earth, natural death places boundaries on the pain of a fallen world. Natural death places boundaries on the despair and futility of life in the context of the Fall. In the same way that the land placed boundaries on the chaos and despair of the deep (see Genesis 1), natural death places boundaries on the despair and futility of life in the context of the Fall. Could it be that in Genesis 3:22–24, God ushered natural death into the world as grace to humanity in a fallen world?”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right

“King wrote of the “unregenerate segregationist,” that these citizens “have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality.”14”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All