Peter Rollins Quotes

#1. The problem with so much religious communication is that it aims at changing our minds. The result is that we can hear the message of the preacher without necessarily heeding the message; we can listen to the "truth" and agree with it, yet not change in response to it.

Peter Rollins

#2. Love is the crazy, mad, and perhaps ridiculous gesture of saying yes to life, of seeing it as worthy of our embrace and even worthy of our total sacrifice.

Peter Rollins

#3. In other words, the claim I believe in God is nothing but a lie if it is not manifest in our lives, because one only believes in God insofar as one loves.

Peter Rollins

#4. The church is a place where we make our prejudice sacred.

Peter Rollins

#5. Whatever you believe, be open to being wrong

Peter Rollins

#6. This is not about the mere extension of life along a horizontal plane, but about the deepening of life along a vertical plane. Mere longevity cannot render life meaningful any more than brevity has the power to make it meaningless.

Peter Rollins

#7. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain).

Peter Rollins

#8. That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.

Peter Rollins

#9. I like surprising my audiences, and it's compulsory to have fun and be silly; I never take myself quite too seriously.

Rachel Tucker

#10. What we see taking place in the church today is the reduction of God to an idol.

Peter Rollins

#11. It has become increasingly necessary to abandon the use of biblical historiography as a viable source for our own historical writing .. We must be ready to radically alter and consciously distance ourselves from all presuppositions that have been imposed on us by the biblical account.

Frank Charles Thompson

#12. I do believe in Christ, but I would not hold myself up as any paragon of virtue at all - far from it, really.

Michael Hintze

#13. What if the church should be less concerned with creating saints than creating a world where we do not need saints? A world where people like Mother Teresa and MLK would have nothing to do.

Peter Rollins

#14. The evidence of "forgiveness of sin" is not found in a profession of belief, but in a life freed from self-destructive pursuits, scapegoating, and violence.

Peter Rollins

#15. Our religious beliefs have not provided us what they seemed to promise.

Peter Rollins

#16. Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.

Peter Rollins

#17. I deny the resurrection every time I turn my back on the poor or become a cog in a system of injustice

Peter Rollins

#18. To believe is human to doubt is divine.

Peter Rollins

#19. Your job is to take notes, my job is to make that impossible.

Peter Rollins

#20. If you cannot speak your brokenness, your brokenness will speak for you.

Peter Rollins

#21. A true Christian militant attacks systems of oppression and fights for a better world even though that new world might negatively affect their own position of power.

Peter Rollins

#22. Our real beliefs are generally not to be found at the level of ego.

Peter Rollins

#23. This book is about a salvation that takes place within our unknowing and dissatisfaction,

Peter Rollins

#24. The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.

Peter Rollins

#25. The point then is to help break the false distinction between the idea that there are those who are whole and those who have a lack. For the true distinction is between those who hide their lack under the fiction of wholeness and those who are able to embrace it.

Peter Rollins

#26. Corporations took our innate impulse toward dissent and our desire for meaningful change, and transmuted them into effective sales tools for their products.

Daniel Pinchbeck

#27. Truly embracing the fragility and tensions of life ... brings with it the possibility of true joy.

Peter Rollins

#28. The excessive pleasure we imagine receiving from what we want most of all is fleeting at best.

Peter Rollins

#29. A broken shoelace can strangle me.

Brian Spellman

#30. All of the advice that I give, I'm not an expert by any means, but it's just my opinion. So if somebody likes me or likes y style or my career, I think they should have that feeling.

Molly Ringwald