Shane Claiborne Quotes
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If you have two coats you have stolen one. We have no right to have more than we need when someone else has less than they need.
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As an American, and especially as a Christian, I am convinced that a love for our own people is not a bad thing, but love doesn't stop at borders. Love is infinitely boundless and all about holy trespassing and offensive friendships.
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So if the world hates us, we take courage that it hated Jesus first. If you're wondering whether you'll be safe, just look at what they did to Jesus and those who followed him. There are safer ways to live than by being a Christian.
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But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus' love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.
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It doesn't matter who you are. Everyone has something to offer the movement of justice
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The true atheist is the one who refuses to see God's image in the face of their neighbour.
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There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of.
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The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into.
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It's hard to hear the gentle whisper of the Spirit amid the noise of Christendom.
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Money has power. And so withholding money has power too, especially when a bunch of people do it together.
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It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.
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I would love to see the Church on the right side of history.
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We've heard from people all around the world, telling us that this is their reality. People need a way to connect the sometimes really hard reality in which they wake up each morning with the movement of the Spirit.
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Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the poor rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said.
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God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.
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[Mahatma] Ghandi said in a world with so many hungry people it just makes sense that God would come as food. God sent the living bread and the living water in a world where there is so much thirst and so much hunger.
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It is a dangerous day when we can take the cross out of the church more easily than the flag. No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays.
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I always tell our community that we should attract the people Jesus attracted and frustrate the people Jesus frustrated. It's certainly never our goal to frustrate, but it is worth noting that the people who were constantly agitated were the self-righteous, religious elite, the rich, and the powerful. But the people who were fascinated by him, by his love and grace, were folks who were already wounded and ostracized — folks who didn't have much to lose, who already knew full well that they were broken and needed a Savior.
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I'm just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, "When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me.
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When we really began executions rather than lynchings, black folks were 22% of our population in 1950, for instance, but they were 75% of the executions. Now, African-Americans are 13% of the population, but they're still almost half of death row, and over a third of the executions. 34% of the executions are black folks. So, like, I mean, things like the race of the victim is one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed.
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The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.
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We should refuse to get sucked into political camps and insist on pulling the best out of all of them. That's what Jesus did - challenge the worst of each camp and pull out the best of each.
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Look through the prayer books. You'll see lots of dates. You'll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.
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It's not that hard to say slavery is wrong after we've abolished it.
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There are some - called 'death fatigue' - people who just grow so tired of death, so they don't want to keep perpetuating death and creating more victims and more anger and more pain. They want to heal from that, and I think that's exactly what God wants to do. And, interestingly enough, that's part of what God's original law was doing with the 'eye for an eye' thing. It was actually to limit the patterns of retaliation and then to begin to heal from that.
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I think we've misinterpreted some of the scriptures to justify the death penalty. So whereas a lot of folks in America feel like we can do far better justice - it's more expensive to do the death penalty than the alternatives - there's so many reasons that people come to the conclusion to abolish the death penalty.
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Jesus is challenging that when addressing "who is your neighbor" and he has a lot of hard things to say about family, "unless you hate your own family you are not going to be a disciple." He is challenging the limits of our compassion and our love as if someone's kid suffers it should be as devastating to us as if it were our own kid. That is what the early church said.
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It's unilaterally true that it costs more to maintain the death penalty than the alternatives to it, and we can leverage more resources to victims families. We can do all sorts of creative ways of healing the pain that people have done by channeling the energy and resources to other more redemptive forms of justice.
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I think a lot of people view the death penalty as a debate class or something. The cost and what's at stake is really, really a big deal.
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This is what Jesus had in mind: folks coming together, forming close-knit communities and meeting each other's needs-- no kings, no major welfare systems, no presidents necessary. His is a theology and practice for the people of God, not a set of suggestions for empire.
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