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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 was raised in a nominal Roman Catholic home, but without any really strong faith there.
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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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Temptation coaxes us toward sin, and sin leads to sickness and death, and ultimately confinement in the realm of the evil one.
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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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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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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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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.
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The New Testament Scriptures are full of references to the malice of the devil, but we generally overlook them. I think this is because our idea of salvation is that Christ died on the cross to pay His Father the debt for our sins.
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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.