Quotes about Tradition

Listen, I didn't know how to make coffee when I came to the United States. Because in Colombia the maids do it.

One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.

Every profession has its traditions and its traditionalists. But the traditionalists in the pulpit are much more certain than the others that the Lord is on their side.

Esteem the church fathers and other writers, but value none of them as equivalent to the word of God.

organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God.

As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name

That is true for both liberals and conservatives: the liberals deny the vertical arm of the cross (transcendence and tradition); the conservatives deny the horizontal (breadth and inclusivity).

This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.

Although Jesus was clearly of the masculine gender, the Christ is beyond gender, and so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation and to give God a more feminine character—as the Bible itself often does.

No civilization has ever survived unless the elders saw it their duty to pass on gifts of Spirit to the young ones.