(via droppitlikeitshot)
"Christian joy, the joy of Easter, is offered to the world not to guarantee a permanently happy society in the sense of a society free from tension, pain or disappointment, but to affirm that whatever happens in the unpredictable world – sometimes wonderfully, sometimes horribly unpredictable – there is a deeper level of reality, a world within the world, where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work, a world with which contact can be made so that we are able to live honestly and courageously with the challenges constantly thrown at us. And on the first Easter morning, it is as if ‘the fountains of the great deep’ are broken open, and we are allowed to see, like Peter and John at the empty tomb, into the darkness for a moment – and find our world turned upside down, joy made possible."
— Rowan Williams, 2011 Easter Sermon
(Source: archbishopofcanterbury.org, via invisibleforeigner)
"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."
— G.K. Chesterton
(Source: invisibleforeigner)
"At its most basic level, the everyday practice of being with other people is the practice of loving the neighbor as the self. More intricately, it is the practice of coming face-to-face with another human being, preferably someone different enough to qualify as a capital “O” Other - and at least entertaining the possibility that this is one of the faces of God."
— Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World (via invisibleforeigner)
"I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith… I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the twentieth century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always, not just in the twentieth century. Peter said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith."
— Flannery O’Connor
(Source: invisibleforeigner)
