Art Killings

“It is not a kindness for a parent to allow a child to play with a scorpion or touch a hot radiator; nor is it a kindness for the church to give its blessing to forms of sexual expression that, as Paul notes, degrades the body created by God.”
― Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics

“Suffering is not an embarrassment to the Christian faith. It is the thread with which Christ's name is stitched into our lives.”
― Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

“Its main thesis is that not only the emerging Christianity drew on contemporary Judaism but that rabbinic Judaism, too, tapped into ideas and concepts of Christianity to shape its own identity; that, far from being forever frozen in ingrained hostility, the two sister religions engaged in a profound interaction during late antiquity.”
― Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other

“A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World