Quotes about Perspective

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.

Christians are not particularly gifted at knowing how we sound to others, especially in parts of the world where our voices are the loudest and most numerous.

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)

Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.

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).

When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I return to the Book - not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are.

Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered.

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.

If I trust what I see on my phone more than what I see out my window, what does it mean to believe that the real world is not where I live?

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.

I had lived so long in the mainstream that I never even though about how I sounded from the margins

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.