Religious Discourse Quotes

I think my faith as a Muslim is very important. One of the core values is that you are always trying to build consensus. So when it comes to figuring out if something is permissible or not in Islam, it's usually a discussion, and people have to come to a consensus in order for something to be approved.

I write all my sermons.

I was brought up as a Catholic, and I'm no longer a Catholic. I don't talk about my beliefs too much in public probably because I feel very strongly that it's something personal - more than personal, it's private.

God's inexplicable. God is beyond the everything. And yet we can't cease to blather about it.

I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.

'Preacher' really appeals to my iconoclastic nature because I'm a student of comparative world religions since my early 20s, so I love shows that really challenge what you think about all these things. I think it's genius. I was so excited there was a role I could play on it.

Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.

There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations.

I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I've read it three times all the way through. It's a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don't just read things I agree with.

Many a long dispute among divines [theologians] may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.

Pope John Paul II was a great presence on the stage. Pope Benedict is a much more gentle and refined person, and I think he benefits greatly from the television close-ups because he wants to engage in a dialogue, in conversation. He wants to put forward his views in a measured, eloquent, rational way.

A sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one - and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form - is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith.

My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration. We need you to speak up and speak out in ward and stake councils.

What we need in Europe is to push back against the idea that religion is so farfetched that it's not worth talking about.

I have learned to interface - what I think would be the contemporary term - with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.

When you're out there talking about your faith and what you believe in, you'll face some backlash. But mostly, I've received support.

The answer to bad religion is not secularism. It’s better religion.

We will convert the entire world to Islam with our logic. We are confident that the Islamic logic, culture, and discourse can prove their superiority in all fields over all schools of thought and theories.

Religion features more now in my life than it did when I was a kid - my dad rejected the Catholic church as a young man. I had no religious upbringing, but certainly, Dad was a kind of secular humanist. I don't know if he was an atheist or agnostic. I regret I didn't talk to him about it.

Painless preaching is as good a term as any for what we do.

In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.

The half-baked sermon causes spiritual indigestion

Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.

Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.

We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.