“His admonishing voice may grate, and we may wish he would clean up his language, but in this age we need to listen to whatever voice is available to us telling the truth that needs to be heard, particularly if we want to resolutely avoid hearing it.”
“I wanted to read that sermon because I suspect that most of you ministers have not preached about abortion. You have not preached about abortion because you have not had the slightest idea about how to do it in a way that would not make everyone in your congregation mad. And the reason that you have not known how to preach a sermon on abortion is that you thought that you would have to take up the terms that are given by the wider society.”
“One of the things that liberal democratic society has encouraged Christians to believe about what they believe is that what it means to be a Christian is primarily belief!”
“When I described myself as a “high church Mennonite” many years ago I was not kidding.”
“Jean Bethke Elshtain is rightly admired for her courage, for her trenchant critiques of peculiarly American pathologies, and for the wisdom of her political judgment. We think, however, that her current attempt morally to justify the Bush presidency’s “war against terrorism” along with its entire National Security Strategy”in Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (Basic, 2003)”is nothing more than an uncritical justification of the ideology of America as empire. It is itself a deeply ideological work rather than one of careful and critical thought.”
“Christians in modernity thought their task was to make the Gospel intelligible to the world rather than to help the world understand why it could not be intelligible without the Gospel.”
“After carefully studying the Report of the Human Embryo Research Panel, we conclude that this recommendation is morally repugnant, entails grave injustice to innocent human beings, and constitutes an assault upon the foundational ideas of human dignity and rights essential to a free and decent society.”
“I write in defense of Paul Ramsey. In “Editorial Secrets Revealed,” Richard John Neuhaus insists that Paul Ramsey was “a bad writer” (Public Square, April). Ramsey is not here to defend himself, so I must rise to the occasion”.
“Yet like it or not John changed my life, and I think he ought to be held accountable for that. Reading Yoder made me a pacifist. It did so because John taught me that nonviolence was not just another “moral issue” but constitutes the heart of our worship of a crucified messiah.”
“Barth understood that recovering Christian speech is work and it is a work that the world literally cannot live without. The heart of Barth’s theology is the presumption that if we get God wrong, we get everything wrong: our politics, our science, our art, our very lives”.
