Religious Tradition Quotes

#1. However superficially appealing, the idea that a religious tradition could be saved from crisis because a group of intellectuals radically reinterpreted its sacred texts is the kind of conceit that only, well, an intellectual could possibly believe.

Ross Douthat

#2. Every religious tradition is rooted in mysteries I don't pretend to understand, including claims about what happens after we die. But this I know for sure: as long as we're alive, choosing resurrection is always worth the risk.

Parker Palmer

#3. No matter what religious tradition you come from, you likely carry baggage and harbor stereotypes when it comes to the Holy Spirit. It's

Francis Chan

#4. The critical question is how a religious tradition is interpreted. Is it interpreted in ways that are pro-human rights or in ways that are a throwback to the Dark Ages?

Khaled Abou El Fadl

#5. From the Muslims I learned from the extraordinary pluralism of the Koran, the fact that the Koran endorses every single one of the major world faiths, but I was particularly enthralled by the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, which is so open to other religious faiths.

Karen Armstrong

#6. Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.

Pat Conroy

#7. Throughout the history of medicine, including the shamanic healing traditions, the Greek tradition of Asclepius, Aristotle and Hippocrates, and the folk and religious healers, the imagination has been used to diagnose disease.

Jeanne Achterberg

#8. Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.

Barbara Kingsolver

#9. To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

Chaim Potok

#10. Speaking from my own religious tradition in this Christmas season, 2,000 years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child in a manger because the inn was full.

Al Gore

#11. As guardians of a continuity of religious and racial tradition" the Zionists were, Balfour decided, "a great conservative force in world politics." Immediately

Barbara W. Tuchman

#12. Mormonism is the house whose walls I know best. It is the story I am not abandoning because it is the story I choose-and in many ways gas chosen me-again and again to grapple with. Mormonism is my native spiritual language and many of the threads with which my life's tapestry is woven.

Ashley Mae Hoiland

#13. Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#14. Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.

Peter Singer

#15. I still noticed that little streak of rebelliousness coming up in me again - the same sense of dissatisfaction I had felt earlier with the empty rituals and institutionalized values of all religious traditions.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

#16. India has a long tradition of reinterpreting religious myths.

Amish Tripathi

#17. Whatever your religious tradition is, if it's important to you and you don't feel comfortable talking about it, you end up coming across as insincere.

Tim Kaine

#18. If you look throughout human history ... the central epiphany of every religious tradition always occurs in the wilderness.

John F. Kennedy

#19. We are not a religious tradition with a creed, but a religious movement that has always wedded social justice work to theology

James Luther Adams

#20. Assumed understanding based upon religious tradition is the breeding ground for error.

Robert G. Paul

#21. There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.

Michael Sandel

#22. I'm Jewish, but not overly religious, and have certainly never formally observed the Fourth Commandment, other than via the tradition of wearing white on Friday nights at summer camp, which never seemed to dovetail with the fact that Fridays were also the night for grape juice.

Rachel Sklar

#23. Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her.

James Hal Cone

#24. I'm a Sikh; it's part of my religious tradition to never cut my hair and keep it wrapped in a turban.

Waris Ahluwalia

#25. ... religious traditions build up meaning only over time and in a communal context. They can't be purchased like a burger or a pair of shoes.

Kathleen Norris

#26. Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. Modern

Abraham Joshua Heschel

#27. The territorial state is such an ancient form of society - here in Europe it dates back thousands of years - that it is now protected by the sanctity of age and the glory of tradition. A strong religious feeling mingles with the respect and the devotion to the fatherland.

Christian Lous Lange

#28. We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)

Karen Armstrong

#29. The history of our nation is intertwined with a certain religious tradition, and that the First Amendment was not intended to result in the complete exclusion of religious beliefs from our public classrooms.

William Bennett

#30. I hope all of you will inherit and carry forward the fine traditions of China's religious circle in patriotism and religious piety and in upholding peace.

Jia Qinglin

#31. Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East - the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.

Karen Armstrong

#32. Mehmet was the first sultan, and one of the first Muslims anywhere, to defy religious tradition by allowing his portrait to be made.

Stephen Kinzer

#33. The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#34. Hen Maistre adopts Bossuet's bold idea that "the heretic is he who has personal
ideas" - in other words, ideas that have no reference to either a social or a religious tradition - he provides
the formula for the most ancient and the most modern of conformities.

Albert Camus

#35. Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable.

Reza Aslan

#36. The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition.

Albert Einstein

#37. I have sympathy for anyone who finds consolation anywhere we can. And many people do find it in religious tradition as it has been. I mean, I love much of that tradition. But somehow, that just didn't speak to me in the way that it does to some.

Elaine Pagels

#38. The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices.

Bill Bradley