John Shelby Spong Quotes

I remember when I heard the words "Biblical criticism" in my town, it was with disdain: "Biblical criticism? How dare you?".

I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.

The whole history of these books (i.e. the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

You never get the Shakespeares right. It's not possible.

I don't think that books are wondrous, magical things that come from nowhere. It's important that a book has clues about where and how it was written.

I get scripts and think, 'There's not enough here to get my teeth stuck into.' That's a result of studying English, where you luxuriate in these big, lush novels.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

After I was cast, I decided to read 'Sharp Objects'. I ended up drowning it in sticky notes, highlighter and pen. It became my little diary I could refer to. I took little quotes out of the book and transferred them onto this scrapbook I kept about Amma.

My work on what is called 'deep reading' explores the range of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that underlie not only the emergence of creative thought when we read but also the development and strengthening of capacities like empathy and critical analysis that we can apply to the rest of our lives.

We read the whole Bible, cover to cover, over and over again... It wasn't that we read selective parts of the Bible. It was that we interpreted it in this very selective way.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?

Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.

I've read the Bible. I think the Bible's a great book, but it's a novel. It's beautifully written and la-di-da, but people really took it the wrong way.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

It is fashionable in some academic circles to exercise scholarly criticism of the Bible. In so doing, scholars place themselves above the Bible and seek to correct it. If indeed the Bible is the Word of God, nothing could be more arrogant. It is God who corrects us; we don’t correct Him. We do not stand over God but under Him.

Hebrews . This book is much superior to most of the writings attributed to St. Paul, though passages in the other books are very admirable.

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.

An active and creative reader is a re-reader.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Edited by mostly unknown scholars in A.D. 367, compiled from documents written 30 to 110 years after the Christ event by no one who was present at the events, and composed for the most part by unknown authors in the Greek language that Jesus never spoke, it is held up as the only true record of the Christ story.