HARVEY COX

Not to decide is to decide.

Secularization is the process by which certain responsibilities pass from ecclesiastical to political authorities.

The notions of consumer choice and local control have stormed the religious realm.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . .

The present crisis in the Islamic world may stem from too many loud and conflicting voices, all claiming religious authority.

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.

There has never been a better raconteur than Jesus of Nazareth.

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.

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

What we are seeking so frantically elsewhere may turn out to be the horse we have been riding all along.

Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back.

What we are seeking so frantically elsewhere may turn out to be the horse we have been riding all along.

Not to decide is to decide.

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.

There has never been a better raconteur than Jesus of Nazareth.

The notions of consumer choice and local control have stormed the religious realm.

The present crisis in the Islamic world may stem from too many loud and conflicting voices, all claiming religious authority.

Secularization is the process by which certain responsibilities pass from ecclesiastical to political authorities.

I am dead against trying to keep religious conservatives out of the political debate. The tactic of exclusion is self-defeating.

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.

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

The real ecumenical crisis today is not between Catholics and Protestants but between traditional and experimental forms of church life.

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

It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.

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.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . .

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.

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

"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.

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