Catherine Keller > Quotes

“The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.”
― Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming

“Flowers tell us about the delicacy and tenderness and whimsical poignant hopefulness of the earth. They tell us about this unexpected unnecessary beauty that takes us off our guard and bursts through our cynicism every year”
― Catherine Keller

“The impulse behind perpetual negation, then, is a yearning for God that will accept no proxies – that is to say, no idols. Even our contemplation of the divine names must be sacrificed at the altar to the unknown God”
― Catherine Keller, Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

“And in all this chaos well ordered in sevens, John was not seeing, let alone presetting, the future. He is reading a pattern in his present: a pattern with the many-headed systemic force to shape history as we know it. Even now.”
― Catherine Keller, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances

“Flowers tell us about the delicacy and tenderness and whimsical poignant hopefulness of the earth. They tell us about this unexpected unnecessary beauty that takes us off our guard and bursts through our cynicism every year”
― Catherine Keller PhD