Shane Claiborne Quotes

There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.

A lot of the world looks to the United States, whether we like it or not.

One of the great dangers in political engagement is misplaced hope.

We say it is idealistic to think we can continue to live the way we live - with 5% of the world using half the world's resources, with $20,000 a second being spent on war.

To be nonpartisan doesn't mean we're nonpolitical.

Karl Barth said it well: "We have to read the Bible in one hand... and the newspaper in the other." Our faith should not cause us to escape this world but to engage it.

The more I travel, the more I see how important it is to each population to see that their history of the good and the bad is remembered by others.

It's always a good idea to have a nun next to you when you get arrested!

Whenever folks say radical Christianity is "a phase" of youth, I tell them they need to meet our 80-year-old nun or my friend Tony Campolo.

Jesus still has a really great reputation and the Spirit is still moving. I've got a lot of hope for a generation that takes Jesus seriously, once again.

The problem is that the Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul stuff may feel good, but none of that typical stuff helps when somebody in your neighborhood is murdered.

With the early Christians you couldn't have God as your father unless you have the church as your mother. This isn't accepting the church as a perfect thing.

The more recent effort to encourage everyone to pray in common involves so many people.

Look through the prayer books. You'll see lots of dates. You'll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.

God can use anything, and anyone - even a king or a president, even a tax collector or a businessman, a priest or a prostitute, a Republican or a Democrat.

I think in the end, God's justice is redemptive, it's restorative, it's about giving life, not taking life.

There are some Christians who totally disengage from politics and set their minds on heaven so much that their faith is so heavenly minded that it is no earthly good.

There are people who are dangerous, and evil is real.

The question for me is not are we political, but how are we political? We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage.

The dreams get anchored in aged wisdom not some utopian fantasy.

I think of the Catholic worker movement and Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and others.

That is the power of the Eucharist. At the communion table you have rich and poor together in the early church and they were being challenged.

We can also cling to the treasures of our faith and get rid of the things that are cluttering that. It is a time we are seeing some trending away from the things that were cluttering our faith.

I'm excited we can be part of making the death penalty history.

I think a lot of people view the death penalty as a debate class or something. The cost and what's at stake is really, really a big deal.

The Eucharist is a symbol of that as you have bread, the staple food of the poor, and wine, a luxury of the rich, which are brought together at the table.

I think they [ monastic folks ] were going to the desert to build a new society and in a sense to build a new world, a new culture together where it was easier to be good and holy.

We have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.

The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.

There is one big misunderstanding of the monastics leaving society.

The end of war begins with people who believe that another world is possible and that another empire has already interrupted time and space and is taking over this earth with the dreams of God.

I don't know if you've read the Bible, and if you haven't, I think you may be in a better place than those of us who have read it so much that it has become stale.

The time has come for a new kind of conversation, a new kind of Christianity, a new kind of revolution.

Money has power. And so withholding money has power too, especially when a bunch of people do it together.

It is a dangerous day when we can take the cross out of the church more easily than the flag. No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays.

We are faithful not to the triumphant golden eagle (ironically, also an imperial symbol of power in Rome) but to the slaughtered Lamb.

How ironic is it to see a bumper sticker that says 'Jesus is the answer' next to a bumper sticker supporting the war in Iraq, as if to says 'Jesus is the answer - but not in the real world.

If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

What is the point in calling anything God if it does not also hold sway in every part of one's life--especially one's politics?

Only God is awesome.

Most good things have already been said far too many times and just need to be lived.

Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.

The lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like 6 september 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

the church was an international institution long before globalization.

We have placed such idolatrous faith in our ability to protect ourselves that we call it more courageous to die killing than to die loving.

We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet.

Beyond miracles, what has lasting significance is love. It wasn’t that Jesus healed a leper, but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.

It’s hard to hear the gentle whisper of the Spirit amid the noise of Christendom.

When i ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, i can feel the Spirit whisper to me, ‘you tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.

While most activists could use a good dose of gentleness, I think most believers could use a good dose of holy anger.