Pastoral Resources

I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them.

Christ does not save us by acting a parable of divine love; he acts the parable of divine love by saving us. That is the Christian faith.

Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it's good enough for Texas.

I don't think Christmas is necessarily about things. It's about being good to one another, it's about the Christian ethic, it's about kindness.

We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.

My whole damn family was nice. I don't think I've imagined it. It's true. Maybe it has to do with being brought up as Christian Scientists. Half of my relatives were Readers or Practitioners in the church.

I found myself facing a Christian Science Reading Room. My God! It had been eight years. There had never been any renunciation of religion on my part, but like so many people, it was a gradual fading away.

I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it western, democratic and Christian.

And I did a movie called Basil with Jared Leto and Christian Slater.

When I started to sing, my mother would have me engaged to perform at the Women's Christian Temperance Union national or annual meetings. I would hate doing this because I wanted to play baseball or go off skiing.

If you pray enough for things, I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now, every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.

Why should any man have power over any other man's faith, seeing Christ Himself is the author of it?

I don't think that fundamentalism has anything to do with Jesus Christ. They call themselves Christians, but if that's Christian, count me out. Fundamentalism is built on fear and greed. They're telling you to give them your money otherwise you're going to hell.

A Protestant has seldom any mercy shown him, and a Jew, who turns Christian, is far from being secure.

Which prophecy of Christ we see wonderfully to be verified, insomuch that the whole course of the Church to this day may seem nothing else but a verifying of the said prophecy.

We must be both more conservative and more liberal than most students of Christian worship: conservative in holding exclusively to God's commands in Scripture as our rule of worship, and liberal in defending the liberty of those who apply those.

I've also committed my time and resources to many local organizations like Christmas in April, Catholic Community Services, and Hudson County Meals on Wheels.

The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life.

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.