Diana Butler Bass Quotes

#1. The biggest issue of the twenty-first century is not necessarily the "decline" of neighborhood. It may be that we have all moved to a new neighborhood and have not learned how to get along with the new neighbors.

Diana Butler Bass

#2. The moment that we think we know, we've lost our perspective on wisdom.

Diana Butler Bass

#3. When I get a little money I buy books," he confessed to a friend. "If any is left, I buy food and clothes."13

Diana Butler Bass

#4. Whereas militant Christianity triumphs over all, generative Christianity transforms the world through humble service to all. It is not about victory; it is about following Christ in order to seed human community with grace.

Diana Butler Bass

#5. We must abandon the external height images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is. - Paul Tillich

Diana Butler Bass

#6. Hospitality is the practice that keeps the church from becoming a club, a members-only society.

Diana Butler Bass

#7. Spiritual awakening is not ultimately the work of invisible cultural forces. Instead, it is the work of learning to see differently, of prayer, and of conversion. It is something people do.

Diana Butler Bass

#8. Conversion is not a single prayer. Conversion is pilgrimage.

Diana Butler Bass

#9. That it is precisely when we recognize our common humanity - when we recognize our own humanity in the face of the other - it is then that we also recognize the face of God.

Diana Butler Bass

#10. Doctrine is to be the balm of a healing experience of God, not a theological scalpel to wound and exclude people.

Diana Butler Bass

#11. Fear brings out the basest instincts," writes British political scientist Sue Goss, "and narrows our sense of belonging to self-preservation."16

Diana Butler Bass

#12. The Internet is the stained glass picture of the 21st century.

Diana Butler Bass

#13. Although churches seem the most natural space to perform spiritual awakening, the disconcerting reality is that many people in Western society see churches more as museums of religion than sacred stages that dramatize the movement of God's spirit.

Diana Butler Bass

#14. Enacting love was a critical aspect of experiencing love. Devotion and ethics intertwined.

Diana Butler Bass

#15. Why is it that the choice among churches always seems to be the choice between intelligence on ice and ignorance on fire?

Diana Butler Bass

#16. With social media, you have the chance to be the Lutherans that Luther imagined.

Diana Butler Bass

#17. I'm waiting now, but I will be ready. We are mutual participants, you and I, intertwined.

Diana Butler Bass

#18. Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.

Diana Butler Bass

#19. What we need is here. - Wendell Berry

Diana Butler Bass

#20. Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspiration and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.

Diana Butler Bass

#21. Theologians pitted devotion and morality against belief, defining faith no longer as a way of life but rather as intellectual assent to certain creeds or confessions; their books were filled with "quarrelling, disputing, scolding, and reviling."38

Diana Butler Bass