Baptist Catholic Quotes

Jesus said his Father's House has many rooms. In this metaphor I like to imagine the Presbyterians hanging out in the library, the Baptists running the kitchen, the Anglicans setting the table, the Anabaptists washing feet with the hose in the backyard, the Lutherans making liturgy for the laundry, the Methodists stocking the fire in the hearth, the Catholics keeping the family history, the Pentecostals throwing open all the windows and doors to let more people in.

Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses. Flood waters await us in our avenues. Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche Over unprotected villages. The sky slips low and grey and threatening. We question ourselves. What have we done to so affront nature? We worry God. Are you there? Are you there really? Does the covenant you made with us still hold? Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters, Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air. The world is encouraged to come away from rancor, Come the way of friendship. It is the Glad Season. Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner. Flood waters recede into memory. Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us As we make our way to higher ground. Hope is born again in the faces of children It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets. Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things, Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors. In our joy, we think we hear a whisper. At first it is too soft. Then only half heard. We listen carefully as it gathers strength. We hear a sweetness. The word is Peace. It is loud now. It is louder. Louder than the explosion of bombs. We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence. It is what we have hungered for. Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace. A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies. Security for our beloveds and their beloveds. We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas. We beckon this good season to wait a while with us. We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come. Peace. Come and fill us and our world with your majesty. We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian, Implore you, to stay a while with us. So we may learn by your shimmering light How to look beyond complexion and see community. It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time. On this platform of peace, we can create a language To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other. At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ Into the great religions of the world. We jubilate the precious advent of trust. We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope. All the earth's tribes loosen their voices To celebrate the promise of Peace. We, Angels and Mortal's, Believers and Non-Believers, Look heavenward and speak the word aloud. Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud. Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation. Peace, My Brother. Peace, My Sister. Peace, My Soul.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. ... This is the kind of America I believe in--and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a "divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the "freedoms for which our forefathers died.

Let us forget that we are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, or Free-thinkers, and remember only that we are men and women. After all, man and woman are the highest possible titles. All other names belittle us, and show that we have, to a certain extent, given up our individuality, and have consented to wear the collar of authority—that we are followers. Throwing away these names, let us examine these questions not as partisans, but as human beings with hopes and fears in common.

mother, with her upbringing in the primitive Baptist church, believed that converting to Roman Catholicism was a step upward in the social order. Of course she was wrong; when I grew up in the South, a Roman Catholic was the weirdest thing you could be.

When we lose the contemplative mind, or non-dual consciousness, we invariably create violent people. The dualistic mind is endlessly argumentative, and we created an argumentative continent, which we also exported to North and South America. We see it in our politics; we see it in our Church’s inability to create any sincere interfaith dialogue—or even intra-faith dialogue. The Baptists are still fighting the Anglicans as “lost” and the Evangelicals are dismissing the Catholics as the “Whore of Babylon,” and we Catholics are demeaning everybody else as heretics, and each of us is hiding in our small, smug circles. What a waste of time and good God-energy, while the world suffers and declines. We have divided Jesus.

Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did, and never will agree. They are not in the least related. They are deadly foes. What has religion to do with facts? Nothing. Can there be Methodist mathematics, Catholic astronomy, Presbyterian geology, Baptist biology, or Episcopal botany?

Difficult as it may be for some people to imagine, God does not, we repeat here for emphasis, prefer Baptists over Hindus, Catholics over Jews, Muslims over Mormons, or any religion over any other religion. God does not even prefer those who believe in God over those who do not believe in God. These are not God’s ideas. These are the ideas of human beings who think that these are God’s ideas.

Morality comes from religion? There are no Baptist babies or Catholic babies or Muslim babies. Religion is imposed on children by adults and society, and morality is an evolutionary adaptation. Period.

The world’s full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry—every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them.

I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.

Jesus is not a white, middle-class Republican. Jesus is not a Democrat, a Libertarian, a Marxist, or a Socialist. Jesus is not a Baptist, a Catholic, a Lutheran, or a Buddhist. Jesus isn’t even a Christian. Jesus Christ is Lord.

Simple, powerful, poignant, the Sign of the Cross is a mnemonic device like the Mass, in which we sit down to table with one another and remember the Last Supper, or a baptism, where we remember John the Baptist's brawny arm pouring some of the Jordan River over Christ. So we remember the central miracle and paradox of the faith that binds us each to each: that we believe, against all evidence and sense, in life and love and light, in the victory of those things over death and evil and darkness.

God doesn’t care what you call yourself. He’s not impressed with Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist, Lutheran… Those are words that people made up, and they mean nothing to God…nothing. He sees right through all that stuff, into your heart. It’s not about church, it’s not about doing a list of activities, and it’s not about calling yourself a particular name or going through some particular ritual. It’s much more personal than that.

The Liturgy may be considered a school for acquiring four fruits: the presence of God, sorrow for sin, joy, and prayer.

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns.

Pastor Russell lived in nearby Pittsburgh and said that there was no hell. This was terrible for we all knew that everyone but the Baptists were going there, so to believe there was no hell upset all the countryside theology.

At this moment the President is beginning to speak in New Orleans and the Vice-President is mounting the platform at NASA a few miles away. Both are making a plea for unity. The President, who is an integrationist Mormon married to a liberated Catholic, will appeal to Leftists to respect law and order. The Vice-President, a Southern Baptist Knothead married to a conservative Unitarian, is asking Knotheads for tolerance and understanding, etcetera. The poor U.S.A.! Even

it confirmed Mother’s secret conviction that the world had enough trouble without insisting all worship God the same way. There was room before the Throne for everyone who served Him—Baptists and the Hindus, Seventh Day Adventists, Muslims and Jews, as well as Catholics.

Whether God’s a Catholic, a Baptist, a Jew, a Muslim, or a quantum mechanic, He gives us compensation for our pain, compensation right here in this world, not just in those parallel to it and not just in some afterlife. Always compensation for the pain…if we recognize it when we see it.

I heard about this man who fell into a pit, and while he was down there several people came by and offered their opinions. The Pharisee said, “You deserve to be in the pit.” The Catholic said, “You need to suffer while you’re in the pit.” The Baptist said, “If you’d been saved, you wouldn’t have fallen into the pit.” The charismatic said, “Just confess I’m not in the pit.” The mathematician said, “Let me calculate how you fell into the pit.” The IRS agent said, “Have you paid taxes on that pit?” The optimist said, “Things could be worse.” The pessimist said, “Things will get worse.

Do you believe in God? I don't think I ever asked you that one. Well I do now. But my God isn't your Catholic varietal or your Judaic or Mormon or Baptist or Seventh Day Adventist or whatever/whoever. No burning bush, no angels, no cross. God's a house. Which is not to say that our house is God's house or even a house of God. What I mean to say is that our house is God.

Who Started Your Church? • Calvary Chapel, 1965: Chuck Smith • Mormon church, 1830: Joseph Smith • Disciples of Christ, 1809: Thomas Campbell • Baptist church, 1609: John Smyth • Presbyterian church, 1560: John Knox • Calvinist church, 1536: John Calvin • Lutheran church, 1517: Martin Luther • Eastern Orthodox church, 1054: Eastern Patriarchs • Catholic Church, 33: Jesus Christ

Beyond the family or particular Christian tradition, how much effort do we make to consider what the Mennonites or the Episcopalians, the Baptists or the Pentecostals, the Methodists or the Presbyterians have to say to the rest of us out of their DIFFERENCES, as well as out of the affirmation in common with other Christians? As I suggested earlier, our patterns of ecumenicity tend to bracket out our differences rather than to celebrate and capitalize upon them. Finding common ground has been the necessary first step in ecumenical relations and activity. But the next step is to acknowledge and enjoy what God has done elsewhere in the Body of Christ. And if at the congregational level we are willing to say, 'I can't do everything myself, for I am an ear: I must consult with a hand or an eye on this matter,' I suggest that we do the same among whole traditions. If we do not regularly and programmatically consult with each other, we are tacitly claiming that we have no need of each other, and that all the truth, beauty, and goodness we need has been vouchsafed to us by God already. Not only is such an attitude problematic in terms of our flourishing, as I have asserted, but in this context now we must recognize how useless a picture this presents to the rest of society. Baptists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics failing to celebrate diversity provide no positive examples to societies trying to understand how to celebrate diversity on larger scales.

I grew up with the strong impression that a person became spiritual by attending to these gray-area rules. For the life of me, I could not figure out much difference between the dispensations of Law and Grace. My visits to other churches have convinced me that this ladder-like approach to spirituality is nearly universal. Catholics, Mennonites, Churches of Christ, Lutherans, and Southern Baptists all have their own custom agenda of legalism. You gain the church’s, and presumably God’s, approval by following the prescribed pattern.

Though all the Protestant denominations have historically condemned the veneration of holy objects (relics) and their use in healing, the Catholic church - until recently - preferred to depend entirely upon the magical qualities attributed to the possessions or actual physical parts of various saints and biblical characters for healing. The Vatican not only permitted but encouraged this practice, which entered history in the third century. Catholic churches and private collections still overflow with hundreds of thousands of items. Included are pieces of the True Cross (enough to build a few log cabins), bones of the children slain by King Herod, the toenails and bones of St. Peter, the bones of the Three Wise Kings and of St. Stephen (as well as his complete corpse, including another complete skeleton!), jars of the Virgin Mary’s milk, the bones and several entire heads and pieces thereof that were allegedly once atop John the Baptist, 16 foreskins of Christ, Mary Magdalene’s entire skeleton (with two right feet), scraps of bread and fish left over from feeding the 5,000, a crust of bread from the Last Supper, and a hair from Christ’s beard - not to mention a few shrouds, including the one at Turin.

To get an initial hint of the distance between the mind-set of parable's original audience and our own twenty-first-century perspectives, we might begin by reflecting briefly on the term 'good Samaritan.' Today, we use the term as if it were not peculiar. Yet as far as I am aware, there are not 'Good Catholic' or 'Good Baptist' hospitals; there are not social service organizations called 'Good Episcopalian' or 'Good Mexican' or 'Good Arab.' To label the Samaritan, any Samaritan, a 'good Samaritan' should be, in today's climate, seen as offensive. It is tantamount to saying, 'He's a good Muslim' (as opposed to all those others who, in this configuration, would be terrorists) or 'She's a good immigrant' (as opposed to all those others who, in this same configuration, are here to take our jobs or scam our welfare system), or, as Heinrich Himmler put it to a gathering of SS officers, every German 'has his decent Jew' - that is, knows one good Jew - and as far as Himmler was concerned, even one was too many, because that might create sympathy. The problem with the labeling is not simply a lack of sensitivity toward the Samaritan people - yes, there are still Samaritans. It is also a lack of awareness of how odd the expression 'good Samaritan' would have seemed to Jesus's Jewish contemporaries.

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

While we must continue to align ourselves in denominations that share our theological distinctives, at the local level our bias should be in the direction of cooperation with other congregations. Because of this belief, Redeemer Presbyterian Church has for a number of years given money and resources to churches of other denominations that are planting churches. We have helped to start Pentecostal churches, Baptist churches, and Anglican churches, as well as Presbyterian churches. For our efforts we have received sharp criticism and a lot of amazed stares. We believe this is one clear way to practice the kind of catholicity that turns a city of balkanized Christian churches and denominations into a movement.

His father was a Baptist preacher who was saved after a dream about flying an airplane over a landscape of erupting volcanoes. A wall of flame appeared in front of him and he opened the door and jumped. He felt himself drifting softly, safely, toward earth and he looked up and saw that Jesus had him by the hands and was using his own sacred body to parachute him down. This seems like a specifically Baptist dream. Catholic dreams haven’t caught up to airplanes yet. The dream that converts a Catholic is more likely to take place in a medieval prison, or on a slave ship in the days of Ben-Hur, or in a sinister outhouse filled with red light.

But in the years before the council, in a typical American parish, that ancient liturgy was too often approached haphazardly, celebrated carelessly, treated as an obligation to be rushed through as quickly as possible. After the council, of course, the introduction of a new streamlined liturgy gave immeasurably more scope to the casual approach. In Why Catholics Can’t Sing, Thomas Day comments: We can be reasonably sure that the Last Supper did not begin with the words, “Good evening, apostles.” Intuition tells us that John the Baptist did not cry out in the wilderness, “Repent, sin no more, and havernice day.” Common sense tells us that there is something immensely wrong and contradictory about starting off a ritual with “Good Morning.” We might even say that the laity in the pews “short circuits” when greeted this way at Mass. The church building, the music, and the celebrant in flowing robes all seem to say, “This is a ritual,” an event out of the ordinary. Then, the “Good Morning” intrudes itself and indicates that this is really a business meeting and not a liturgy, after all. Today, after more than a full generation of liturgical experimentation, the integrity of the liturgy can be compromised by two opposite dangers: caring too little about the established rubrics or caring too much.

Europeans had highly developed regional and national cultures and societies before they bolted on Protestantism. America, on the other hand, was half-created by Protestant extremists to be a Protestant society. American academics accept the idea of American exceptionalism in one of its meanings—that our peculiar founding circumstances shaped us. “The position of the Americans,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “is…quite exceptional,” by which he meant the Puritanism, the commercialism, the freedom of religion, the individualism, “a thousand special causes.” The professoriate rejects exceptionalism in today’s right-wing sense, that the United States is superior to all other nations, with a God-given mission. And they also resist the third meaning, the idea that a law of human behavior doesn’t apply here—scholars of religion insist that explanations of religious behavior must be universal. The latest scholarly consensus about America’s exceptional religiosity is an economic theory. Because all forms of religion are products in a marketplace, they say, our exceptional free marketism has produced more supply and therefore generated more demand. Along with universal human needs for physical sustenance and security, there’s also such a need for existential explanations, for why and how the world came to be. Sellers of religion emerge offering explanations. From the start, religions tended to be state monopolies—as they were in the colonies, the Puritans in Massachusetts and the Church of England in the South. After that original American duopoly was dismantled and the government prohibited official churches, religious entrepreneurs rushed into the market, Methodists and Baptists and Mormons and all the others. European countries, meanwhile, kept their state-subsidized religions, Protestant or Catholic—and so in an economic sense those churches became lazy monopolies.*10 In America, according to the market theorists, each religion competes with all the others to acquire and keep customers. Americans, presented with all this fantastic choice, can’t resist buying. We’re so religious for the same reason we’re so fat.

As the old joke holds, everyone in the American South is Baptist, even including atheists, as the God in whom they do not believe is the Baptist God. Rejecting fears of a mass conversion to Protestantism in Latin America, one Catholic responded that in that continent, “you are Catholic just by breathing the air. The Catholic faith has so permeated the life of the people—the courtroom, the kitchen, the plaza, the architect’s eye—that it would take centuries for Latin America to sweat it out.

I spent most of my childhood straddling and navigating two cultures: my Black world of home and the neighborhood, Resurrection Baptist, and Daddio’s shop; and the white world of school, Catholic church, and the prevailing culture of America. I went to an all-Black church, lived on an all-Black street, and grew up playing with mostly other Black kids. But at the same time, I was one of only three Black children attending Our Lady of Lourdes, the local Catholic K–8.

...I don't care if you're Baptist, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, or one of those adorable little Scientologists. If you *use* God to tell people *created by* God that they're sinners for who they love, then I give you a great big middle finger and I invite you to sit on it.

The Baptists argued that the Church of God should be a community of godly men; that faith is the gift of God, and not to be compelled by force of arms; that only those rites sanctioned or commanded by Christ and His Apostles are binding upon His people; and that the only Lawgiver of the Church is Christ Himself. Each party [Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Presbyterians] had, therefore, its own reason for hating the Baptists; and as each had yet to learn the true nature of religious freedom, each oppressed and persecuted in turn.”9 Baptists protested that they were not Anabaptists, because they did not see baptizing believers who had been sprinkled as infants as re-baptizing and because they did not want the radical, anti-state label hung on them as earned by some Anabaptist and 5th Monarchy activists. It appears that after some time of such protests, in answer to the inevitable question, “If you're not Anabaptists, what are you?” 10 the name “Baptist” emerged.

Sadly, in many ways, our denominations separate us from our brothers and sisters in Christ. They can make it easier to take our focus off him. For example, I’ve seen this. When asked, “What’s your religion?”, people respond with, “I’m Catholic.” Or I’m “Baptist.” Our denomination is not our religion. If we ever get asked such a question, our response should be, “I am a Christian!” We only attend a certain church. The Lord never wants us divided by man-made ideas or doctrines. He wants all who believe to be unified in him. As we saw earlier in the image of the vine and branches.

When you transgress or sin, you must return to your personal religion for forgiveness. Catholics do not confess their sins to Baptist ministers. Baptists don’t ask forgiveness from Muslim clerics. You must seek forgiveness from the place where you learned about sin. It is as if the religion infects you with the disease and then gives you a fake cure.

John the Baptist wasn’t Catholic. He was the very first Baptist—everybody knows that.” Sarah shook her head. “They called him ‘the Baptist’ because he baptized people, silly.” I tapped my fingers on the table. “He swore off women, refused decent food and clothing, and was always yelling at people to repent. If that isn’t Baptist, I don’t know what is.

am not writing for scientists. I only note in passing that for scientific gatekeepers to continue to enforce atheism as a fundamental dogma is as counterproductive now as it once was for scientists stuck in Catholic orthodoxy to insist against evidence that the earth was flat. Truth cannot be suppressed forever, so the academic dam is certain to break. And when it does, the revelations soon to follow about who and what and where we are will change all humanity for the better. It isn’t only scientific oxen that we will be goring here, but some religious folks will be incensed. I am sorry about that. If you prefer to believe whatever it is that your own religion teaches, all I ask is that you be open-minded whenever your own death starts to happen. As you will see, one way to give yourself unnecessary grief is to insist on a certain kind of afterlife. But otherwise, the good news is that the afterlife is not a guessing-game. Catholics and Baptists both get into heaven. And Jews and Buddhists. And everybody else.

In old census reports, I found a hint of how British administrators had vivisected Sri Lanka in the early 20th century. In 1901…the census classified people into seven categories—Europeans; Burghers, Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, referring to Muslims of south Indian origin; Malays; and the indigenous Veddahs of eastern and south-eastern Sri Lanka. “A mere 10 years later, the matrix had exploded. By ethnicity, a Sri Lankan in 1911 could identify himself in any one of 10 ways, and then again in any one of 11 ways by religious denomination—a multiplicative tumult of identity. Slender distinctions were now officially recognized. A Sinhalese could be a low-country Sinhalese or a Kandyan Sinhalese; a Tamil could be a Ceylon Tamil or an Indian Tamil, depending on how recently his family had settled in Sri Lanka; a Christian could be a Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, or a Salvationist, or he could belong to the Church of England or ‘Other Sects.’ Assembling legislatures based on such muddled ethnic loyalties helped the British by disrupting solidarity and nationalism because, as Governor William Manning once wrote to his secretary of state in London, ‘no single community can impose its will upon the other communities.

People were born and raised Democrats as they were born and raised Baptists or Catholics. It was not something you questioned. As one said, “You were a Democrat come hell or high water. Or you were a Republican.” In

The cure for alterity is communion in the life of the Trinity, and the community that participates in the divine life of radical otherness is the church.

With his deep understanding of the needs of the Church, Pius X often saw things with a most remarkable clarity. An interesting conversation of the Holy Pontiff with a group of Cardinals was reported in the French clerical publication, “L’Ami du Clerge.” The Pope asked them: “What is the thing we most need, today, to save society?” “Build Catholic schools,” said one. “No.” “More churches,” said another. “Still no.” “Speed up the recruiting of priests,” said a third. “No, no,” said the Pope, “the MOST necessary thing of all, at this time, is for every parish to possess a group of laymen who will be at the same time virtuous, enlightened, resolute, and truly apostolic.

O Lord Jesus, with Thy most kind and merciful, and yet most powerful, hand, deign to form my heart so that it may be like Thine.

Let us consider ourselves an exhausted traveler, panting for breath and parched with thirst, looking for a cool spring. At last, I see one, but it is on a high, steep rock. I thirst. The more I look at that spring, which would so refresh me as to enable me to continue my journey, the more I yearn to quench my increasing thirst. I will, cost what it may, reach that spring; and I make every effort, but all in vain. But, there is someone near, who seems to be awaiting my request for help, in order to help me. He even carries me in the steepest places, and after a few minutes, I am able to quench my thirst. In like manner, we can drink of the living waters of grace flowing from the Heart of Jesus.

Action, to prove fertile, stands in need of contemplation;

Father St. Jure, S.J., commenting on Canticles 8:6 — “Place me as a seal upon thy heart and as a seal upon thy arm” — says that “the heart signifies the interior, contemplative life, and the arm, the exterior, active life, and that Holy Scripture mentions the heart and the arm together in order to show that both modes of life can be found perfect together in one person. The heart is mentioned first, because it is far more noble and necessary than the arm.

It becomes a journey of willingness to live with the mystery of God and God’s ways that are not understood at the time.

{11:12} But from the days of John the Baptist, even until now, the kingdom of heaven has endured violence, and the violent carry it away.  

Jefferson’s views on religious liberty, however, appealed to many more moderate voters. New Jersey Republicans charged that Jefferson’s enemies used religion as a means of assault “because he is not a fanatic, nor willing that the Quaker, the Baptist, the Methodist, or any other denominations of Christians, should pay the pastors of other sects; because he does not think that a Catholic should be banished for believing in transubstantiation, or a Jew, for believing in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”14 Still,

In 1968, the United Bible Societies (UBS) and the Vatican entered into a joint agreement to undertake hundreds of new interconfessional Bible translation projects around the world, using functional equivalence principles. Again, Nida was one of the principals on this collaborative work.”[122] Now that the Greek text and the interconfessional committees and projects were set up, the rest followed like clockwork. In 1968-77 a new, “Critical Text” Hebrew Old Testament, called the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, began to be jointly published at Rome and by the United Bible Societies. So from this date, Roman Catholics, Protestants and Baptists had the same Hebrew text, as well as Greek text. The Reformation Bible was officially discarded in favor of a single, manmade Greek and Hebrew text.

the original commission for the ceiling was a plan designed by the pope and his closest advisers. Jesus was to have been the focal point of the project, surrounded by his apostles and probably also Mary and John the Baptist. This commission was especially dear to the pope’s heart, since the chapel had originally been built by his uncle Sixtus IV and would be an eternal monument to their family’s glory. Now Michelangelo was about to subvert the entire project to secretly promote his own beliefs, especially those of humanism, Neoplatonism, and universal tolerance. He had already somewhat appeased the pope with his ploy of putting him in the place of Jesus—but how was he going to get the pope to pay for the world’s largest Catholic fresco without a single Christian figure in it?

Some of the bishops or pastors began to assume authority not given them in the New Testament. They began to claim authority over other and smaller churches. They, with their many elders, began to lord it over God's heritage (III John 9). Here was the beginning of an error which has grown and multiplied into many other seriously hurtful errors. Here was the beginning of different orders in the ministry running up finally to what is practiced now by others as well as Catholics. Here began what resulted in an entire change from the original democratic policy and government of the early churches. This irregularity began in a small way, even before the close of the second century. This was possibly the first serious departure from the New Testament church order.

Mark well! That neither Christ nor His apostles, ever gave to His followers, what is know today as a denominational name, such as "Catholic," "Lutheran," "Presbyterian," "Episcopal," and so forth -- unless the name given by Christ to John was intended for such, "The Baptist," "John the Baptist" (Matt. 11:

The persecutions by the established Roman Catholic Church are hard, cruel and perpetual. The war of intended extermination follows persistently and relentlessly into many lands, the fleeing Christians. A "Trail of Blood" is very nearly all that is left anywhere. Especially throughout England, Wales, Africa, Armenia, and Bulgaria.

is well to note also that in order to prevent the spread of any view of any sort, contrary to those of the Catholics very extreme plans and measures were adopted. First, all writings of any sort, other than those of the Catholics, were gathered and burned.

The Catholics, strange as it may seem, accused all who refused to depart from the faith with them, believe with them--accused them of being heretics, and then condemned them as being heretics.

Second: Jesus Christ, not some other man or woman, is the founder of his Church. In Matthew 16:13–19, Jesus asks his apostles, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?” This elicits a series of incorrect answers: “Some say John the Baptist, others say Eli’jah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.

With some forty-seven thousand churches, the Southern Baptist Convention was – and still is – the largest non-Catholic faith group in the country. In that fact, I saw the reality that a whole lot of kids and congregants were being left at increased risk for sexual violation by predatory pastors.

At times, BGCT [i.e., Baptist General Convention of Texas] officials tried to downplay the Baptist abuse problem with an ‘at least we aren't as bad as the Catholics’ schtick. They claimed that while the Catholic abuse problem involved children – and usually boys – the Baptist problem was more about clergy ‘misconduct’ with adult women. ‘Most of ours are heterosexual relationships with adults,’ they said. It was an offensive and minimizing claim, supported by no evidence. To the contrary, The Associated Press had gathered insurance data showing that the abuse of children in Baptist churches was likely just as pervasive as in Catholic churches.

The wellspring of these folk churches was a stern Calvinism which the Scotch element of the population had carried with it from the dour highlands. Without competition from other religious ideas or doctrines it slowly pervaded the whole populace, and eventually became deeply rooted in their mores, so widely and unquestionably accepted as to constitute unwritten law. And while its adherents might split into a myriad of disputing minor sects, they were to remain steadfastly loyal to its basic tenets. One of these was a hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope as nothing less than arms of Satan. Another was confession of sins “before men,” and a third was the requirement of baptism. Still another was an immutable principle that no preacher or minister be compensated in any way for his time or work. Their Biblical hero was John the Baptist, and each church was fiercely proud to call itself “Baptist,” the members insisting that they alone were true followers of the methods and doctrines of the prophet.

This was about the time that Mr. David Brainerd was expelled out of Yale college, who did the most afterwards towards spreading Christianity among the Indians of any man in our day. How far were the above actions from a catholic behavior towards the Baptists, pretended to by many!

Of course, I wasn’t Catholic, but it’s all the same to me. I don’t care if you’re Baptist, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, or one of those adorable little Scientologists. If you use God to tell people created by God that they’re sinners for who they love, then I give you a great big middle finger and I invite you to sit on it.

Pius X declared that: “If our own spirit does not submit to the control of a truly Christian and holy way of life, it will be difficult to make others lead a good life.” And he adds, “All those called to a life of Catholic Works ought to be men of a life so spotless that they may give everybody else an effective example.”26

There is nothing like having a few Mexican Catholics around to dull the spines of the Baptist prickly pear,

Mark Twain used to say he put a dog and cat in a cage together as an experiment, to see if they could get along. They did, so he put in a bird, pig, and goat. They too got along fine after a few adjustments. Then he put in a Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic; soon there was not a living thing left.

Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” in the 1970s; the Southern Baptist Convention called for the legalization of abortion in 1971, and evangelical leaders, including W. A. Criswell of First Baptist Church in Dallas, applauded the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.

the belief system of Buddhism is one that can be described as “large-minded.” This means that those who practice it are open to accepting the moral teachings of other belief systems. Therefore, they are unconcerned with labels that pertain to specific religions, such as “Catholic,” “Baptist,” “Hindu,” “Muslim,” or even “Buddhist” itself.

Through impressive growth from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, evangelical Christianity, although anchored in the South, became the dominant, most dynamic expression of American Christianity. Leading church historian Charles Marsden estimates that in the late nineteenth century, over half of the general population and more than eight in ten Protestants were evangelical. When southern Methodists rejoined their northern brethren in denominational reunification in the late 1930s, they brought their Lost Cause theology with them into what was at the time the largest Protestant denomination. By the second half of the twentieth century, Southern Baptist had become the largest single denomination in the country, claiming more than sixteen million followers at their apex. And beginning in the late 1970s, white Catholics received a powerful infusion of this theology through their involvement with the Christian right movement, which fortified their own existing streams of colonialist theology. As I show in chapter 5, even though white evangelical Protestants have begun to shrink as a proportion of the population in the last decade, the diffusion of their theology into white Christianity generally has meant that their particular cultural worldview, built to defend their peculiar institution, holds influence far beyond their ranks today.

Plagiarism was not considered blameworthy in the ancient world. Authors freely copied from predecessors without recognition. Thus, the world has no idea about what outside materials, and other teachings were added to the four authorized Gospels of the New Testament. On the other hand, the age and authenticity of the Nag Hammadi texts are not disputed. They were not subjected to two-thousand years of translating, editing, embellishing and re-copying as were the four traditional Gospels. These Nag Hammadi Gospels, and other writings found at Nag Hammadi, challenge the long-held precepts of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the Christian churches (Lutheran, Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Evangelical and the like) of today. The Roman Catholic Church and Christian churches are unwilling, unprepared and reluctant to accept these long-hidden gospels.

Jesus had said that God sent Jesus to die for the WHOLE WORLD, which means he died for Catholics, baptists, and all denominations. He died for all of us and he wanted to save all of us.

He was going to live with his Uncle Jonathan, whom he had never met in his life. Of course, Lewis had heard a few things about Uncle Jonathan, like that he smoked and drank and played poker. These were not such bad things in a Catholic family, but Lewis had two maiden aunts who were Baptists, and they had warned him about Jonathan.

He thought that he was a small scale version of John the Baptist – one who presages what is to come. He was right in that regard.

As New York continued to advertise itself as a model safe haven for religious tolerance, the variety of religion amplified. New York was now home to thousands of Dutch Calvinists, Roman Catholics, Jews, German Pietists, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Methodists, and a slew of other faiths.

Money: hand-over-fist money, sweat-of-brow money, burnout money. Finger-to-the-bone money, under-the-table money, black money, dirty money, filthy lucre, money-changing-in-the-temple, thirty-pieces-of-silver money, blasphemous, usurious, treacherous money; profits, taxes, bribes, licenses, fees, levies, octrois, tariffs; middlemen, policemen, watchmen; painters, carpenters, dyers, writers, weavers; doctors, teachers, preachers, judges, accountants, barristers; wives, widows, cooks, servants, slaves, prostitutes, concubines; lewd men, austere men, gamblers, hoarders; Catholics, Roundheads, conformists, Baptists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsis, Armenians; black men, brown men, yellow men, white; reformers, saviours, visionaries, criminals; all in pursuit of money, money, money.

See, I’ve got this coping mechanism thing where, when I’m feeling frightened or vulnerable or over my head, I intellectualize the situation to try and regain a sense of control. (I’ve read a lot of books on air travel, parenting, and death.) It was scary starting over at a new church and trying to make new friends, so before each visit, I girded myself with a sense of smug detachment wherein I could observe the proceedings from the safety of my intellectual superiority, certain I could do a better job at running the show thanks to my expertise as, you know, a Christian blogger. Oh, I talked a big game about the importance of ecumenicism and the beauty of diversity within the global church, but when I deigned to show up at one of these unsuspecting congregations, I sat in the pew with my arms crossed, mad at the Baptists for not being Methodist enough, the Methodists for not being Anglican enough, the Anglicans for not being evangelical enough, and the evangelicals for not being Catholic enough. I scrutinized the lyrics to every worship song, debated the content of every sermon. I rendered verdicts regarding the frequency of communion and the method of baptism. I checked the bulletins for typos. In some religious traditions, this particular coping mechanism is known as pride.

The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations, had two doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was Johannism; the other public, which was the Roman Catholic. Thus they deceived adversaries whom they sought to supplant. Hence Free-Masonry, vulgarly imagined to have begun with the Dionysian Architects or the German Stone-workers, adopted Saint John the Evangelist as one of its patrons, associating with him, in order not to arouse the suspicions of Rome, Saint John the Baptist, and thus covertly proclaiming itself the child of the Kabalah and Essinism together.

I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…

He Dwells Among Us He was not the light, but came to testify to the light. John 1:8 John the Baptist knew his place. He recognized how insignificant he was in comparison to the One whom he announced. At the same time, John also valued his own significance. He accepted the tremendous calling that was his, to be trusted as a messenger of the Light. And isn’t that true for each of us? We, too, are not the Christ, but we are filled with his love and light. Like John, we are also entrusted with announcing Christ’s coming among us. Each thought, word and deed of ours that contains love becomes a messenger announcing the presence of the Holy One. Thus it is that all through Advent we can proclaim, without any egotistical fanfare, that the Promised One is among us. Our patience, generosity, understanding, forgiveness, all these—and other choices we make to be persons of love—quietly declare the Word who became flesh is dwelling among us. Sr. Joyce Rupp, O.S.M. Isaiah 61:1-2, 10-11 • Luke 1:46-50, 53-54 • 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 • John 1:6-8, 19-28

Growing up in the South meant a steady dose of right-wing politics. Everyone around us was some type of Evangelical, strict Catholic, or Mormon. My school, Stonewall Jackson High, was named for the Confederate general. When I took the field, I was one of Stonewall Jackson’s Raiders. Virginia was the borderline between South and North and we knew exactly which side of the Potomac we lived on. In my family, my mom and stepdad were the only ones who converted to the LDS church. The rest worshiped Southern Baptist style.

Well, Big Ma had gone down to Friendship Baptist Church to hear Senator Kennedy tell the black people they were American citizens who deserved decent homes, decent education for their children, safe neighborhoods, and opportunities. But Big Ma talked more about taking off her glove to shake a Kennedy’s hand than she talked about his speech. You’d have thought Big Ma would’ve been baking cookies for the “Vote for Bobby” office on Fulton Street, the way she talked and talked about Senator Kennedy. But she said she wouldn’t vote for him because his hair was too long and he let people call him Bobby and not Robert. He was too young, talking about changing things in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in every other ghetto. She said that while that sounded good, and the people hollered and clapped for him, he was still a rich, young Catholic boy whose daddy made millions selling liquor.