Quotes about Tradition

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.

I cannot think of a culture in human history, before the present postmodern era, that did not value law, tradition, custom, authority, boundaries, and morality of some clear sort. These containers give us the necessary security, continuity, predictability, impulse control, and ego structure that we need, before the chaos of real life shows up.

The first-half-of-life container, nevertheless, is constructed through impulse controls; traditions; group symbols; family loyalties; basic respect for authority; civil and church laws; and a sense of the goodness, value, and special importance of your country, ethnicity, and religion (as for example, the Jews' sense of their "chosenness").

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."1

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."1

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.