Shane Webb

“And if a trans* person comes to your church, they should be welcomed with open arms and accepted. Not just accepted, but embraced, delighted in, listened to, learned from, honored, loved, cared for, and shown the heavenly kindness saturated with compassion.”
― Preston M. Sprinkle, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say

“To get an initial hint of the distance between the mind-set of parable's original audience and our own twenty-first-century perspectives, we might begin by reflecting briefly on the term 'good Samaritan.' Today, we use the term as if it were not peculiar. Yet as far as I am aware, there are not 'Good Catholic' or 'Good Baptist' hospitals; there are not social service organizations called 'Good Episcopalian' or 'Good Mexican' or 'Good Arab.' To label the Samaritan, any Samaritan, a 'good Samaritan' should be, in today's climate, seen as offensive. It is tantamount to saying, 'He's a good Muslim' (as opposed to all those others who, in this configuration, would be terrorists) or 'She's a good immigrant' (as opposed to all those others who, in this same configuration, are here to take our jobs or scam our welfare system), or, as Heinrich Himmler put it to a gathering of SS officers, every German 'has his decent Jew' - that is, knows one good Jew - and as far as Himmler was concerned, even one was too many, because that might create sympathy. The problem with the labeling is not simply a lack of sensitivity toward the Samaritan people - yes, there are still Samaritans. It is also a lack of awareness of how odd the expression 'good Samaritan' would have seemed to Jesus's Jewish contemporaries.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“The Bible’s primary invitation to every Christian is not to act more like a man or to act more like a woman, but to act more like Jesus.”
― Preston M. Sprinkle, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say

“•​a faith that remains open to the ever-moving Spirit and new possibilities, rather than chaining the Spirit to our past •​a faith that welcomes opportunities to think critically and reflectively on how we think about God, the world, and our place in it, rather than resting at all costs on maintaining familiar certainties”
― Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs