Robin R. Meyers Quotes

As long as Christianity is the dominant belief system in America, we cannot afford to be biblically or theologically illiterate, regardless of our personal beliefs. (p. 8)

Books
they come home hot in your hands and then by increments they warm your life, like heated bricks in a New England bed.

Resolve to talk more and be entertained less.

Conversation is how values get ordered, how passion is made contagious. If a parent talks about it, it's important. If a child is allowed to join the conversation, then that child becomes more than a table decoration, he has a part to play in the drama that is growing up. If his ideas count, then he counts. Children gain essential access to adulthood by being given a safe place to speak, and by rehearsing their thoughts out loud before the most patient and supportive audience they will ever know.

We know that those who challenge the status quo and do so with both conviction and charisma are at risk of being killed.

It is easier and much more satisfying to rail against the Right than to suggest that we go back to Genesis 1 and study together. Liberals can be just as intolerant as fundamentalists, and we have arrived at a moment in human history when intolerance and hope are mutually exclusive. (p. 6)

The ongoing suspicion that scientific discoveries or rigorous biblical scholarship will undermine faith is a tacit admission that faith is threatened by knowledge, because it is ultimately constructed on weak or faulty assumptions and, like the proverbial house of cards, needs to be "protected" from collapsing. (p. 21)

The most twisted but perennial of American myths is that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. (p. 174)

Faith is always supposed to make it harder, not easier, to ignore the plight of our sisters and brothers. (p. 165)

If the church does not restore the idea of faith as "being", and not "believing," then the gospel story of Jesus as the heart of God in the flesh will wither and perish.

In the end, to say one "believes" something like the virgin birth as biological fact or the miracle stories as literal suspensions of natural law requires nothing in the way of a changed heart or a self-sacrificing spirit.

Faith as 'assensus' (intellectual assent) is relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage.

No matter what our age, we ought to never stop eating books, for books are the feast of the imagination.

The American home has become the noisiest place of utter silence on earth.

Contemporary Christians have declared war on individual immorality but seem remarkably silent about the evil of systems, especially corporate greed and malfeasance. (p. 176)

Indeed, a quick glance around this broken world makes it painfully obvious that we don't need more arguments on behalf of God; we need more people who live as if they are in covenant with Unconditional Love, which is our best definition of God. (p. 21)

Let your children see you kiss. Let them see you embrace. Let them overhear your teasing, your gentle rebukes, even your well-intentioned jealousy. Domestic courtship reinforces the notion that people are together because they want to be together, not because it is the decent, practical thing to do.

If the church is to survive as a place where head and heart are equal partners in faith, then we will need to commit ourselves once again not to the worship of Christ, but to the imitation of Jesus. His invitation was not to believe, but to follow. (p. 145)