At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN…the tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them. One has without truly having. The consumer is right-there is pleasure to be had in good things.
More Brian D. McLaren Quotes
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Too often we see the Bible through whatever lens we get from our culture.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
Ask me if Christianity (my version of it, yours, the Pope’s, whoever’s) is orthodox, meaning true, and here’s my honest answer: a little, but not yet.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
I think it changes everything. You can say the same creed that you said before, but now it’s not a creed that grasps God in the fist of the words, but it’s a creed that points up to a beauty that’s beyond anybody’s grasp.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
A sacred and almost unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of possessing them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this tragedy.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
We should consider the possibility that many, and perhaps even all of Jesus’ hell-fire or end-of-the-universe statements refer not to postmortem [after death] judgment but to the very historic consequences of rejecting his kingdom message of reconciliation and peacemaking.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
I don’t think we’ve got the gospel right yet.I don’t think the liberals have it right. But I don’t think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn’t claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
The Church has little idea how unorthodox it is at any given moment. If a church can’t yet be perfectly orthodox, it can, with the Holy Spirit’s help and by the grace of God, be perpetually reformable.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
I had to face the possibility that the art of living in the way of Jesus was no longer carried on in a holistic way by any single tradition.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
Seventh-Gay Adventists isn’t just a helpful movie, important for the way it can help congregations of any denomination deal graciously and truthfully with the issue of homosexuality.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
The thing I love about The Beatitudes Society is they represent faith and intelligence on fire and there’s enthusiasm and passion and a realization that a more open and progressive approach to faith is something to celebrate.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
A friend of mine says that in the world of religion we often have ignorance on fire and intelligence on ice.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
The cross is almost a distraction and false advertisement for God.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
One of the things that’s happening to a lot of us is that there’s this vision of the beauty of God that transports us and that takes us to a new depth and a new height. It’s one of those things about beauty.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN -
To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall.
BRIAN D. MCLAREN