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Faith is being idealistic, because we have made an idol out of the status quo.

Shane Claiborne

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Shane Claiborne
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: July 11
Author
Writer
Eastern Tennessee
Idealistic
Idol
Idols
Status
Faith
Made

More quotes by Shane Claiborne

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It is the church's job, as Dr. [Martin Luther] King says, to be the conscience of the state, not the chaplain of the state.
Shane Claiborne
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Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.
Shane Claiborne
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The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.
Shane Claiborne
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It's impossible to separate our contemporary practice of the death penalty from our history around race and slavery, and specifically, lynching. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is where executions are happening today. And that's a haunting and eerie thing.
Shane Claiborne
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There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.
Shane Claiborne
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Little movements of communities of ordinary radicals are committed to doing small things with great love.
Shane Claiborne
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For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.
Shane Claiborne
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I like how someone once said being a Christian is not about having new ideas but having new eyes. This is the ability to have our hearts broken with the things that break the heart of God. That is part of what it means to be a Christian.
Shane Claiborne
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There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.
Shane Claiborne
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We are faithful not to the triumphant golden eagle (ironically, also an imperial symbol of power in Rome) but to the slaughtered Lamb.
Shane Claiborne
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The early Christians felt a deep collision with the empire in which they lived, and with politics as usual. They carelessly crossed party lines and built subversive friendships. And we should do that too.
Shane Claiborne
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In the Bible, God uses brothel owners, pagan kings, murderers and mercenaries as instruments of good at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey.
Shane Claiborne
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Philadelphia caught my attention in 1995 when a group of homeless families were living in an abandoned cathedral. Even from the beginning they connected theology with what they were doing. They put a banner on the front of the cathedral that said, How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday.
Shane Claiborne
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We have a relational problem with those who are suffering or who are different from us. All of us are most comfortable around people who are like us culturally and economically.
Shane Claiborne
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We can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.
Shane Claiborne
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I'm excited we can be part of making the death penalty history.
Shane Claiborne
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Jesus taught us a prayer of community and reconciliation, belonging to a new people who have left the land of 'me'.
Shane Claiborne
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The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.
Shane Claiborne
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I moved to Philadelphia to go to school at Eastern partly because I wanted to study the Bible and I also went to study sociology. I like how Karl Barth said we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the world around us.
Shane Claiborne
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The death penalty has succeeded in America, not in spite of Christians, but because of us. The Bible Belt is the Death Belt. Wherever Christians are most concentrated is where executions are happening, and that's deeply troubling to me.
Shane Claiborne