Their family is the church, their vocation is a grateful response for the chance to participate in the divine plan of salvation, their hope lies in the fact Christ has claimed them, and secured the future for them. If we, the church , lived alongside young people as though this were true — if we live alongside anybody as though this were true — we would be the community Christ calls us to be.
- Almost Christian, Kendra Creasy Dean // p198
The role of modern religion—something I hold to be a distinct role of religion different from previous eras in history—is to provide individuals with a set of moral values which fill existential as well as political needs.
- After Religion: Progressive Politics and the Ethics of Modernity, Radical Religion (39)
Christianity is both conservative and radical: it is conservative in upholding the necessary penultimate character of the flawed social orders of this life, and in expecting no realization of a human utopia on earth. It holds that the ultimate meanings in life transcend our existence here. On the other hand it is radical in its ethical critique of all humans constructs, its lack of reference for power for its own sake, and in its adherence to agape— the universal love for all children of God based not on their worth or achievements or potential for self-realization but precisely in their weakness and sinful humanity.
- Religion and Secular Progress, Radical Religon (22-23)
While the enthusiasm and engagement with social transformation initially reinforced its adherents’ religious piety and zeal, social reform eventually became for some Protestants the primary purpose and substance of the Christian faith rather than an outgrowth or expression of it.
- Religion and Secular Progress, Radical Religion
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