For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI’m a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like “Christian.”
More Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
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The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.
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The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.
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Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.
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Once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices…. Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.
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We’re children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We’re also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.
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Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
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You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.
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Most of us like thinking we are God’s only children…At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
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Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
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Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.
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Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR