Lisa Webster of Religious Dispatches interviews Ian Buruma about his book, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.
What does it mean to be cool and what does it mean to be Christian. Are these competing aims? Why is the church today so preoccupied with being cool, fashionable, trendy, and relevant? Where does this phenomenon fit in to the larger narrative of “hip” and “Christian cool”?
If a bird abandons the eggs she has been sitting on, she prevents them from hatching, and in the same way monks or nuns will grow cold and their faith will perish if they go around from one place to another
– The desert mother Amma Syncletica as quoted by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove in The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture
There are many complaints believers and nonbelievers might level against God in the big Western city today, but one thing you have to concede is that He is supreme at keeping the places where is He is worshiped silent. The withdrawal of faith from the urban house of faith has left some awfully dark holes filled with glorious, ecumenical silence.
Veronese’s painting of a remorseful (but bare-breasted) young woman? Donatello’s statue of a hideously aged but spiritually purified hermit? What about the many film versions of Jesus’ life that depicted Mary as a prostitute? They could all be traced back to the sixth-century sermon in which Pope Gregory I conflated Mary of Magdala with other women in the Gospels, and identified her as an iconic repentant sinner.
…doubt is a wonderful thing, and it’s what people fear most and what people castigate themselves about most. Doubt is that moment in the faith life when we put down everybody else’s answers and begin to find our own. We look at everything we’ve been told is holy, is true, and we test it. ~~Chittister
“I speak to audiences across the world and I often get the same questions. ‘Why are you so joyful?’ ‘How do you keep your faith in people when you see so much injustice, oppression and cruelty?’ ‘What makes you so certain that the world is going to get better?’ ~~Tutu
A liturgical resource for Christian communities engaged in God’s reconciling mission throughout the world.
It’s about bodies — To be a body that actually you didn’t pick. It’s incredibly important for people, and I think the challenge about church is not how to make it more relevant, how to make it more hip, cooler, or how to dispense with it entirely in this sort of über-Protestantizing impulse — “It’s just going to be me and Jesus and we’re going to have a great thing going, without anybody else.”
“I think the Gospels would be a very good antidote to fear, because if you just read them and read them slowly they’re simple, but they’re very complicated.”