QUOTES 10

Walter Brueggemann:  “The commandment we have from Jesus is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. (1 John 4.21)  And Jesus went to great length to identify “sister and brother” as everyone, including those most unlike us, those who do not fit, those who upset us and make us feel uncomfortable.”       P.5  “Mandate to Difference”

“The hallmark of the church is not certainty but openness to the Spirit.”  ibid

Richard Holloway:  “The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty.  Where you have certainty you don’t need faith…  Faith, by definition, always implies doubt. .There can be something admirable, something worth doing, in the decision to believe – but it never gives us certainty!  And here’s the catch.  Revealed religions tend to blow a smokescreen round the living reality of the faith-doubt experience and out of the smoke emerges – doctrinal certainty!  Believers are not encouraged to take the plunge of faith, they are invited to swear to the certainty of a series of historic claims that come in propositional form. That is why religious history is so full of disputes over competing interpretations of the certainties contained in the faith package.”   Pages 184ff of Holloway’s memoirs, “Leaving Alexandria”.

Teilhard de Chardin:   “I see the vision of a wider ecumenism than the ecumenical movement in the Christian Churches…The Christian Church is to be a Gathering Community, a Servant Community to other communities of faith, confident in its faith in God as Creator of all, Animater of all, and worshipfully grateful that we have seen Christ the prototype of this universal activity.  Equally I long for the time when the other communities of faith will identify their treasures of wisdom and spirituality and share them with us all.” From a book entitled THE HUMAN SEARCH

Route 443
Leads from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem
Through Occupied Territory.

The Palestinian inhabitants,
On whose land it was built,
Are prevented from
Using it.

Suddenly, quite by surprise,
Palestinian demonstrators
Blocked it.

Why indeed?

Gush Shalom ad in Ha'aretz 19.10.12

Robert Fisk:  “Who can forget the words of the Israeli journalist Amira Haas – Haaretz's reporter in the occupied West Bank, whom I often quote. She told me in Jerusalem that the foreign correspondent's job was not to be "the first witness to history" (my own pitiful definition), but to "monitor the centres of power", especially when they are going to war, and especially when they intend to do so on a bedrock of lies.” From an article in the Independent on war reporting, 3 March, 2012