Thomas Moore

There are two ways to be spiritually secure: one is to attach to a fixed and uncomplicated teaching, leadership, and set of moral standards. Another is to be open to life, ever deepening your understanding and giving up all defensiveness around convictions. The first way offers only the illusion of certainty, an illusion that must be maintained by anxious inflexibility. The second is to live from a deeper source, with values that cannot be codified in a list of rules. Central among these values is love, understood as profound respect for others.
Writing in the sand, p.xvi

Performance and Auntenticity

Christian ministry somehow failed to professionalize:
the clergyman is a jack of all trades...there is nothing which he does that could not be done equally well by a lawyer or bricklayer in the congregation...He does not have a job at all in any sense which is readily understandable today, and today, more than ever before, a person must have a job in order to fit into society...p87

Performing priesthood made him less authentic rather than more: instead of finding unity in a variety of roles, he had come to believe that he was acting rather than being true to himself ...p88

Redefining Christian Britain

Colin Morris

Perhaps Christianity became a problem solving religion when, instead of it converting Europe as is widely supposed, European culture converted Christianity from being a near-eastern apocalyptic faith into a western problem solving ideology to be harnessed to the needs of an optimistic and thrusting scientific civilization. p61 start your own religion

john shelby spong

Look at him! Look not at his divinity, but look, rather, at his freedom.
Look not at the exaggerated tales of his of his power, but look, rather at his infinite capacity to give himself away.
Look not at the first-century mythology that surrounds him, but look, rather, at his courage to be, his ability to live, the contagious quality of his love.

p16...in grief situations that i have entered as a pastor, it is inevitably the religious person who is insensitive, who feels compelled to speak surface assurances, who suppresses real feelings with homilies on faith, and who readily supplies pat answers for diffecult and complex questions.

p54...i am glad the realm of spiritual is no more. i am glad that the god identified with this realm is dead. we isolated the god of our religion in a system and located it in an otherworldly ghetto. Now the secular world has killed that god...but a god who could be isolated from the world could certainly not be either the god of the hebrews or the god of the bible. so perhaps the death of that god is only the death of an idol who masqueraded as god for almost 2000 years...for the first time since christianity escaped its jewish origins, we again perceive reality as a whole.

p164...orthodoxy will have no power unless honest heresy is a possibility.

Browning quoted by Drane

Most of us stand on the boundary: religious communities attract us; we may even participate in them; but we also wonder if they make sense.
The McDonaldization of the church

i-revtrev

Exert from new book:
I like to think that one day out side time and space (I know, that is a paradox!) there existed (another paradox because to exist assumes time) this ‘being’ called Love. This Love was not some ungraspable phenomenon like the wind but had a personality and other personable qualities and in its nature being love, seeking to love, Love decided to create a life that would be able to share in this life force of love but also be objects of love, experiencing and being loved by Love. However, understanding the complexities of this mystery love (and truly who today still understands love), Love gave Love a name…God and so we have: God is Love.

Desperate housewives does church

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xyVEEHidhGE&feature=related