Quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor

When this young priest received my news with grace instead of anger, he reminded me that salvation is not something that happens only at the end of a person's life. Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you," he said, "by the grace of God.

Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?

The last thing any of us needs is more information *about* God.

So of course when it came time to decide what to do with my life, I decided to go to seminary. What else do you do when you are in love with God?

How wonderful of [Jesus] to come back undercover, so that even the people who knew him best had to look, then look again, before they got the crawly feeling that they had seen him somewhere before. It was the perfect setup for people who wanted to know what made him different from anyone else they had met: his ability to reflect their humanity back to them, both familiar and strange, so that they never got tired of searching each other's faces for some sign of him.

If I trust what I see on my phone more than what I see out my window, what does it mean to believe that the real world is not where I live?

An unguarded face is a deep well; you don't go there casually, without ropes or lamps.

It just seems helpful to admit that Christianity is as complicated and conflicted as any other religion, with groups of followers who can believe in the unity of their faith even as they refuse Communion to one another.

Somewhere along the line we bought—or were sold—the idea that God is chiefly interested in religion. We believed that God's home was

The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, 'We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.