Elijah

“When visitors come to a worship service in my own religious tradition, a great deal depends on how warmly they are welcomed and whether they feel included or excluded by what they hear during the short time they are with us. We may have exactly one shot at communicating who we are to people who know nothing about us - or who think they already know a lot about us - but who, in either case, will remember us at the embodiment of our entire tradition, the prime exemplars of our faith.”
― barbara brown taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
― Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

“There are some fingers in my inherited Christian liturgy and language that just don’t point, no matter how much I drench them in silence. But in these cases it’s not because they are overly anthropomorphic or suggestive of dualism. It’s because they’re wrong, or false, or inconsistent with the message of Jesus. I’m speaking especially of patriarchal language that so stresses the power of God that it puts God’s love in jeopardy. So when liturgical prayers or hymns present me with a God who has enemies whom he vanquishes, or a God who gets so angry he damns or destroys, I just clam up, both spontaneously and in protest. And as much as I can, and as sensitively as I can, I let my fellow parishioners and the pastor know of my discomfort and protest. It takes time to change the language of institutions and tradition.”
― Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not be a Christian

“I believe I have discovered something that I suspect characterizes religious experience in whatever tradition or historical context: the more deeply one enters into the core experience that animates one’s own tradition, the more broadly one is enabled and perhaps moved to enter into the experiences of other traditions. The more deeply one sinks into one’s own religious truth, the more broadly one can appreciate and learn from other truths.”
― Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not be a Christian