Frederica Mathewes-Green Quotes
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The Bible, that powerful book, has many effects: it comforts, counsels, instructs, and brings us into the presence of God. But trying to erase offense as one of its functions is a fundamentally misguided task.
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Jesus showed us how to be courageous and sacrificial while we die for our beliefs, not while we kill for them.
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It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of a prideful, vindictive God that they have fled from Jesus' fold.
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A segregated spiritual subculture does women no good, even if it does have adorable butterflies in the logo.
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Someone who wanted to challenge Orthodoxy would not be able to locate a building to hold a protest march in front of. The faith is too diffused.
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Somehow we just don't make the same boisterous fun of Holy Week that we do of Christmas. No one plans to have a holly, jolly Easter.
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Easter may seem boring to children, and it is blessedly unencumbered by the silly fun that plagues Christmas. Yet it contains the one thing needful for every human life: the good news of Resurrection.
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After I graduated from college, while traveling around Europe, hitchhiking, doing the tourist thing, I went into a church in Dublin.
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People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.
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Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness.
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Women and men just aren't that different. Oh, we're different in some intriguing ways, and it can be fun to band together for all-gal or all-guy projects. But when it comes to the tragic mess Christ came to heal, we're pretty much the same.
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What's wrong with us isn't a rap sheet of bad deeds, but a damaged heart, a soul-sickness, that plunges us into fearful self-protection, alienation from God and others.
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As a teenager and a student, I totally cast away the Christian faith. I just believed it was stupid, and only stupid people could believe it. I actually became an anti-Christian, and very antagonistic.
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The devil's main purpose is not to scare us, in a horror-movie way; when we're scared of him, we're alert to him, and that might undermine his plans. Instead, he wants to quietly, subtly lure us into stepping away from God.
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The Church's teaching isn't an official statement, but the cumulative understanding of all the people who have loved and experienced Jesus through time.
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I think intellectualizing annoys me because it is the enemy of experience; you cannot experience the presence of God and analyze it at the same time. You can't analyze anything and experience it simultaneously.
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My mother was an unbeliever - and still is. My father was a nominal Catholic. We would go in to church at the last minute before the gospel reading, take Communion, and walk right out again.
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I was raised in a nominal Roman Catholic home, but without any really strong faith there.
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I've been able to dig deeper into awareness of my own sinfulness, and take baby steps toward spiritual healing. I'm able to worship in an ancient communion full of awesome beauty, one that is now being blessed with quiet revival.
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I know by experience that Jesus Christ is a very powerful spirit - I know by experience that he is probably the most powerful spirit in the universe. I know by experience he is not a mere human being. He is something beyond that.
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Women don't need to have our own little corner of the church where we can feel precious or, alternatively, cranky. In every essential thing, as far as life in Christ is concerned, the differences between men and women are irrelevant.
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People don't do theology in a vacuum but in a community with other theological thinkers, where there's jealousy, vanity, hurt pride, all those things.
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Lots of Orthodox go to church every Sunday but don't know much about the faith. Yet they know that there is something that they don't know much about.
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The Christmas story has such power and such appeal every year. There are other stories we get tired of. You think of your favorite movie; you don't want to watch it 15 times.