Elijah

“And yet, and yet, if my belief in Jesus as the only Son of God requires me, explicitly or implicitly, to denigrate or subordinate other religious figures and religions, then such a belief becomes a clot in the free and life-giving flow of my faith’s circulatory system. I’m sorry. It just does.”
― 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

“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