Quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor

The basic principle is to do no harm. Beyond that, you are free to do quite a lot of things for a living, but they are not all going to come with their own evident purposes. Supplying that purpose is going to be up to you.

All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it.

Reverence for creation comes easily to most people. Reverence for other people presents more of a challenge, especially if those people's lives happen to impinge upon your own.

Finally I asked my friend Judy, who spent many years as a student of Sufism and who embodies fana —the self-annihilating love of God—as well as anyone I know. When I asked her to define spirituality for me, she thought for a moment and said, 'Spirituality is the active pursuit of the God you didn't make up.' I loved that. I also did not know what it meant.

Reason can only work with the experience available to it. Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.

When you live in God, your day begins when you lose yourself long enough for God to find you, and when God finds you, to lose yourself

Reverence was the proper attitude of a small and curious human being in a vast and fascinating world of experience. This world included people and places as well as things.

No one had to tell me why Martha stayed in the kitchen while her sister Mary sat at Jesus's feet. Martha was an introvert. She found chopping potatoes far less exhausting than talking to people, and besides, she could hear everything they were saying right where she was without having to come up with something to say herself.

Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once said he could not define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. Reverence is a little like that. It is difficult to define, but you know it when you feel it.

The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community.

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. That self-canceling feature of my religion is one of the things I like best about it. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.

Another favorite hymn mourns Israel's lonely exile from the Son of God. Another years for a future in which every knee will bow to Jesus. Another urges Christian soldiers onward, marching as to war. When I imagined singing it with a Muslim or Hindu student sitting next to me, my voice dried up. It was a song for insiders, not outsiders. If I had learned anything from going on all of those class field trips, it was how religious language sounds to outsiders, and how much that matters.