Quotes about Understanding

Ask anyone what she means when she says 'God' and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God.

1. When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of the religion and not its enemies. 2. Don't compare your best to their worst. 3. Leave room for holy envy. (Krister Stendahl's rules of religious understanding)

Now Ed and I operate by our first amendment to the Golden Rule, which is not "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," but "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them (instead of thinking they are just like you).

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find the bridges between my faith and the faiths of other people, so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.

Religious illiteracy is a luxury they can no longer afford. This is a new idea for them—that illiteracy might be a problem in religion as well as English—or that a religion class might have life applications beyond going to church.

One of the quietest revolutions in Religion 101 follows a student's recognition that he or she has a worldview, a particular way of viewing reality that it is not the only way. A worldview is a wave, but not the entire ocean.

How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?

The last thing any of us needs is more information *about* God.

The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, 'We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.

Here is a law as reliable as gravity: The degree to which we believe our faith is makes us human is the same degree with which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

Because they were not old enough to serve on committees or wrangle over the order of worship, the children often had a better grasp of what church was all about than the rest of us did.