Richard Rohr Quotes

I was raised Catholic, and I remember in all the pamphlets and pictures we'd look at, Jesus was basically blonde with blue eyes. He kind of looked like Jared Leto.

I think a lot of bands are influenced by religious symbolism and not even necessarily Christianity or Catholicism.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is in the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.

I think of Westernized culture as a good visual for my music.

I always asked my mother, I said, 'Momma, how come is everything white?' I said, 'Why is Jesus white with blond hair and blue eyes? Why is the Lord's supper all white men? Angels are white, the Pope, Mary, and even the angels.' I said, 'Mother, when we die, do we go to Heaven?' She said, 'Naturally we go to Heaven.' I said, 'Well, what happened to all the black angels?'

In most, when you go to church, most churches when they have images of the good shepherd, they show Jesus carrying a nice fluffy lamb. Now fluffy little lambs don't stray from their mommy's. The sheep that will stray is the most obstreperous, troublesome one.

My new tattoo is Jesus being carried by three cherubs. Obviously the cherubs are my boys. At some point they are going to need to look after me. That's what they're doing in the picture. It means a lot.

Whether you interpret the Bible as literature or as the final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all of our lives.

If Jesus had known that his image would end up on Justin Bieber's calf, he would've never started Christianity.

Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them.

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.

The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.

In New York, Catholic groups have forced an art gallery to shut down an exhibition of a six-foot image of Jesus in chocolate. So, the Archbishop of New York was very upset. He said, 'It is appalling to make Jesus out of food! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go bake some communion wafers.'

All Jesus' pictures are falsifications; they cannot be about the real Jesus. This real man must have been totally different, because we know he enjoyed drinking - it is impossible to think of a person who enjoys drinking and not laughing. He enjoyed women - it is difficult to think of a man who enjoys women and not laughing. He was friendly, almost in love, with a prostitute, Mary Magdalene. It is difficult to move with a prostitute - he was not moving with a Catholic monk, not with a priest, not with the Pope... with a prostitute! These were the condemnations against him.

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore.

The pressure to succeed has a lot to do with why people overstep the line. It is a peculiar weakness of western culture where we have made a fetish of success.

Among the plastic saints of our times, Jesus has to do all the dying, and all we want to hear is another sermon about his dying.

Art in the Church fundamentally exists for evangelization

It's no good to shoot a guy anymore. It's not enough. Nobody is throwing anybody off of buildings after seeing these movies, but they are smoking after seeing some good-looking celebrity smoke.

The so-called "remake" is simply a commercial formulation of a much deeper exchange which accounts for the way cinema is what it is.