Harvey Cox Quotes

Let us not project our own spiritual limitations onto the modern world, for it is not the world which prevents us from being religious. The kind of world we live in shapes the manner and mode of our religiousness

Somewhere deep down we know that in the final analysis, we do decide things and that even our decisions to let someone else decide are really our decisions, however pusillanimous.

Not to decide is to decide.

Once written, a classic text is like a bird released from its cage. It develops a life of its own. Its "meaning" is not locked in.

The dominant ethos of the twenty-first century consists of an intermingling of the sacred and the secular.

The political is replacing the metaphysical as the characteristic mode of grasping reality.

Secularism is not only indifferent to alternative religious systems, but as a religious ideology it is opposed to any other religious systems. It is therefore a closed system.

"Religion" can no more be equated with what goes on in churches than "education" can be reduced to what happens in schools or "health care" restricted to what doctors do to patients in clinics. The vast majority of healing and learning goes on among parents and children and families and friends, far from the portals of any school or hospital. The same is true for religion. It is going on around us all the time. Religion is larger and more pervasive than churches.

Man must now assume the responsibility for his world. He can no longer shove it off on religious power.

Scholars of religion refer to the current metamorphosis in religiousness with phrases like the "move to horizontal transcendence" or the "turn to the immanent." But it would be more accurate to think of it as the rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular.

A myth is essentially true because it is a symbol, and a symbol is something that points beyond itself to a truth that might be difficult or impossible to express in ordinary language.

The difference between a "problem" and a "mystery" is that we may be able to "solve" a problem, but a mystery is something we have to live with.

We now live in a 'post-Christian' America . The Judeo-Christian ethic no longer guides our social institutions. Christian ideals and values no longer dominate social thought and action. The Bible has ceased to be a common base of moral authority for judging whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.

The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.

God laughs, it seems, because God knows how it all turns out in the end.

Rick Warren, the influential evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, says that what the church needs now is a "second Reformation," one based on "deeds, not creeds."2

Secular Humanism is opposed to other religions; it actively rejects, excludes, and attempts to eliminate traditional theism from meaningful participation in the American culture.

From the beginning, the Bible says, God has shared his power and tried to enlist us in continuing his creation and in caring for it. Instead, we have messed it up badly more often than we have gotten it right.

Instead of a 'Western Christianity,' we now witness a post-Christian West (in Europe) and a post-Western Christianity (in the global South). America is somewhere in between.

The comic, more than the tragic, because it ignites hope, leads to more, not less, participation in the struggle for a just world.

If freedom once required a secular critique of religion, it can also require a religious critique of the secular.