Henry Chadwick Quotes

No one can fail to see that the power of the Church among large numbers in many communities is today diminishing, or has already ceased.

My ancestors had to keep their customs secret for fear of death or persecution, so it's common to be secretive and discreet about Regla de Ocha. But it's my family's spirituality, so I don't want to keep it secret.

Memory in America suffers amnesia.

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?

To great sections of the church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the 'program.' This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

The Psalms offer us a way of joining in a chorus of praise and prayer that has been going on for millennia and across all cultures. Not to try to inhabit them, while continuing to invent non-psalmic 'worship' based on our own feelings of the moment, risks being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and the ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy

Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.

Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.

As I get older and I get more of this dialogue and I lose more and more brain cells, it really does become the most difficult part of the job!

It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.

Religion worships God, while superstition profanes that worship.

Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

For the last year his grandma had been slipping in and out of reality. One minute she was as clear as a bell and the next she was calling him Simon. Who was Simon? He had no idea.

Every great panic we have ever had has been foreshadowed by a general decline in observance of religious principles.

When it comes to religion, we're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken, with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens.

'Don't worry about senility', my grandfather used to say.

Maybe the past is supposed to fade-and that's actually a kindness of human memory.

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.

we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been

I'm appalled at how many people my age, or even five or ten years younger, have no tangible memories of important history that happened when we were growing up.

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past

Religion is not removed by removing superstition.

There is not a man who does not get senile by the time he reaches sixty. And when one thinks that he will not be senile, he is already so.