Ross Douthat Quotes

I grew up Presbyterian. Presbyterians thought the Methodists were wrong. Catholics thought all Protestants were wrong. The Jews thought the Christians were wrong. So, what I'm financing is humility. I want people to realize that you shouldn't think you know it all.

Unlike the issue of messiahhood, which arose when Jews and Christians were members of the same religio-political community and spoke the same conceptual language, the issues of the incarnation and the Trinity divide people who are no longer members of the same community and who no longer speak the same language.

I have tried to kill sectarianism, whether in Catholics or Protestants.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.

It's unlikely that the organized religions will get more sectarian... or is it? I am not at all sure.

I hope that by going to visit the pope I have enabled everybody to see that the words Catholic and Protestant, as ordinarily used, are completely out of date. They are almost always used now purely for propaganda purposes. That is why so much trouble is caused by them.

For most of American history, of course, the important religious divides were between denominations - not just between Protestants and Catholics and Jews but between Lutherans and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists and the other endlessly fine-tuned sects.

I'm on record as being understood to be a supporter of a reformed establishment, in which other Christian denominations, and other faiths, play a major part.

… very dangerous … because its aim is to introduce a mingling of Protestants and Catholics

Catholics and Protestants remained faithful to their religions, but stopped thinking of them in zero-sum terms and gradually embraced the separation between church and state.

I'm a Christian, but I've coached and played with Muslims and all kind of different religions.

5SM is an ecumenical movement.

Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the way of the Sacramentarians, nor sat in the seat of the Zwinglians, nor followed the Council of the Zurichers.

There are 20,000 Muslim physicians in the United States, Americans putting their lives in the hands of Muslims every day.

I think it's hard to talk about the Muslim world and Christian world as blocks.

My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them."

He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do.... If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)

I've long ago felt, I have many Jewish friends and I very I think creative Jewish friends, and I've long felt that the average Christian didn't realize the tremendous capacity for civic righteousness among our Jewish people.

Alas the Church of England! What with Popery on one hand, and schismatics on the other, how has she been crucified between two thieves!

In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.

A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain.

We cannot hand our faith to one another.... Even in the Middle Ages, when faith was theoretically uniform, it was always practically individual.

Every time we equip the church with a verse, chapter or a story from the Bible, we're really placing another weapon in the hands of the Holy Spirit that He uses to challenge and strengthen the church. I think that's very important.

I think you have to sort of accept that nobody really knows where it's going so there has to be a lot of impulsive kind of attitudes. So it's like a train that's moving and you don't quite know where it's going but you try to steer it in the best way you can realizing that it may go in different places that you had no idea.

You’ll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter. You don’t want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there.” He held out his hand to shake Harry’s, but Harry didn’t take it. “I think I can tell who the wrong sort are for myself, thanks,” he said coolly.