Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Three Quotes for a New Season

"It is a serious mistake on the part of religious and spiritual people to divide the world into believers and unbelievers. We are all believers. The real question has to do with the object of our belief. Is it sufficiently great, infinite, worthy of our absolute endearment? Anything can become a god and idol. The substitutes for divinity are innumerable. They betray the fact that we haven’t yet found deep religion, and they are the raw material to be transformed into the mysteries by which we can live." -Thomas Moore, The Soul’s Religion: Cultivating a Profoundly Spiritual Way of Life, New York: Perennial, 2003, p. 30.

"The Scriptures are in fact full of diverse forms of family and familial relations. Why? What does this say about the majority who do not practice sexuality according to this dictum? Our formulas for sexual ethics are theoretical and do not match the realities of human lives where sex really matters. Instead, our questions ought to be probing and profoundly reflective of sex where it is found and not how we think it is. How do we treat one another when it comes to sexual expression and commitment? How do we treat our primary intimate relationship—with or without a sense of the Sacred and the potential for good?" –Olive Elaine Hinnant, God Comes Out: A Queer Homiletic, Cleveland: Pilgrim, 2007, pp. 4-5.

"The queer Christ comes at a time when Christian rhetoric is used as an anti-gay political weapon. He is a beacon of hope in a world where Christians and gays seem to be at war. He mends the split between body and spirit that has led to violence, poverty, and ecological destruction. Like the Jesus of first-century Palestine, the queer Christ images have come to teach, heal and free anyone who accepts the challenge." —Kittredge Cherry, Jesus in Love, Berkeley: AndroGyne Press, 2006, pp. 13-4.

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