Kat Armas > Quotes

“One of my seminary professors once said that when we read the Bible, we should read it with resistance: constantly asking questions, wrestling with it the way Jacob wrestled with God. May these pages invite you to do just that.”
― Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging: A 40-Day Devotional on the Liberating Heart of Scripture

“When many of us with varying levels of privilege interact with the Bible’s stories, particularly those of Jesus engaging with marginalized women, we often have to force ourselves into the narrative. I wonder if much of our abuelitas’ theological insight comes from the fact that they can see themselves clearly in the story. They don’t need to stretch to imagine what it would be like to be the Samaritan woman or the persistent widow. Many of our abuelas know those stories intimately not only because they’ve committed to studying them and their lessons but because oftentimes those stories are about them. What they pass on to us is a knowledge about God that many of us spend our lives trying to obtain from books and conferences. Our abuelitas may be “uneducated” by the dominant culture’s standards, but they possess PhDs in prayer and Bible interpretation. They may not be ordained as official priests or pastors, but they’ve been playing those roles behind the scenes forever, noticed and called by God.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“But is it really loving if you force someone to leave their own table - the one they've prepared - so that they can sit at yours?”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“To notice the weather is to speak to an embodied way of being; it is to recognize our connection to all created things.”
― Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging: A 40-Day Devotional on the Liberating Heart of Scripture

“The promised land is not simply a new country; it is also the gift of a radically new situation.”6 Ordinary people are forced to make extraordinary decisions to leave the oppressive contexts they find themselves in, in search of something better, a new reality.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“I love that the crowd’s first response was astonishment, confusion. That’s what happens when the Spirit moves. Everything we thought we knew—our understanding of the world, our expectations, our control—is broken open. And in that breaking, something wild and beautiful is born.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“This was unfolding as more women were entering the workforce and divorce rates were rising. But rather than addressing the obvious economic forces at play, evangelicals zeroed in on gender roles and authority as the core of this crisis.10”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“For it is at the site of the dirt that we are joined. And the dirt is our kin. From dust we came, and to dust we will return. We are creatures of the dirt, bound together.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“But the true beauty of the Trinity lies in the absence of such structures. It is an invitation to reimagine God as a relationship based not in dominance but in a belonging vast enough to hold the cosmos.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“And in this history, we must reckon with the ways the church failed to protect the most vulnerable. This reckoning, however painful, is necessary if we are to seek any meaningful healing or reconciliation.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“if there’s anything I do know after years of studying divinity in the academy, it’s that the words I don’t know are a sacred declaration.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“There’s a strange safety when the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, us and them are clear.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“They weren’t just building a tower to get to God; they were building an empire so they could act as one. “Let’s make a name for ourselves,” they said, and that name was to be unmatched. Their desire was to become a civilization that would dominate others.27 They craved homogeneity, a single language, a monoculture. An identity that would be untouchable, universal, pure. But their tower rose only through the labor of others, laid brick by brick on the backs of those beneath them.28”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“But true wisdom cannot flourish in a system that values mastery over mutuality, control over connection, or power over the kind of understanding that is born from lived experience.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“But the truth of the experience belongs to the one who bears it.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“The dominating culture had yet to invite me to see myself and my culture within God’s story.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“It’s hard to talk about family structures in the West without feeling the pull of ancient Rome, where its shadows still linger.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“our abuelas often live lives in which the well-being of those around them is of utmost importance to them.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Before you finish eating your breakfast this morning, you’ve depended on half the world.”30 His”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“They wanted control, but God imposed chaos—a kind of holy chaos that prevents the concentration of power.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“This is why theology cannot be separate from the political. It must ask who has been given the power to decide which bodies bear the image of God and how systems of violence use religious language to justify oppression.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“We are creatures both brilliant and ignorant, significant and insignificant: broken, whole, and healing.”
― Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging: A 40-Day Devotional on the Liberating Heart of Scripture

“Chief Luther Standing Bear once warned, “The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew the lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.”28”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“our fight for an equitable future is intimately connected to our belongingness with one another.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“The concept of race wasn’t a given; it was something that had to be constructed. It took deliberate effort by those in power—politicians, church leaders, intellectuals—to create the idea that skin color could determine one’s humanity, their freedom. Over time these ideas took root. Europeans, including Christians, codified these beliefs into laws and social habits that concentrated power in the hands of those they deemed “white” while denying equality to those they labeled “Black.”24 Christianity played a tragic role in this construction, often associating skin color with sin or unbelief and twisting Scripture to justify oppression and exclusion.25”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“Gardens, after all, resist empire in their very being. They nourish without demanding, heal without exploitation, and persist beyond the structures that seek to suppress them.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“I think of the day Jesus sat in a boat, teaching the crowds on the shore. "The kingdom of God is..." they leaned in, bracing for words about men and armies, kings and domination. They expected images of power, grandeur, and conquest. But Jesus, with gentle subversion, spoke instead of a woman. A woman who took a little yeast, hid it in dough, and watched it rise into enough bread to nourish a whole community.

This kingdom does not arrive with spectacle or force; it moves in unseen, quiet abundance through the ordinary. It breaks apart the illusions of power. It shatters our expectations.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“Take Proverbs 22:17–24:22, which parallels the Instruction of Amenemope, an Egyptian wisdom text dating back to at least the twelfth century BCE that offers guidance on how to live with humility, integrity, and care for the vulnerable.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“Power is not in speed or size. It lies in knowing oneself.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

“Blessed are those who are crouching and cowering because society has cast them out. These are the people for whom the kin-dom of heaven is reserved—the ones on the lower rungs of society’s ladder, the ones the world has tried to forget.”
― Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire: Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World