Tammy Key

“It was not until I began meeting people of other faiths in their most sacred spaces that I learned how bruised some of them were by Christian evangelism. Worshippers at the Hindu Temple returned to the parking lot after one of their major festivals to find Christians by their cars with pamphlets demeaning their holiday. Muslims were used to Christians saying malicious things about the Qur'an. Native Americans were tired of being asked what God they prayed to. The shared consensus is that Christian evangelists are not very good listeners. They assume they are speaking to people with no knowledge of God themselves. They are disrespectful to other people's faith.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

“Some are questioning whether the churches they grew up in have anything to offer them as they make their ways in a culture of many cultures with many views of truth, some of which make a great deal of sense to them. For those who counted on God to protect them from so many choices, it is as if the heavenly Father let go of their hand in a crowd one day and vanished into a sea of divine possibilities. I cannot protect the students in my classes from this any better than I can protect myself. Existential dizziness is one of the side effects of higher education, and it affects teachers too.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

“Christians are not particularly gifted at knowing how we sound to others, especially in parts of the world where our voices are the loudest and most numerous.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

“Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand