Shane Claiborne Quotes - Page 9

I think they [ monastic folks ] were going to the desert to build a new society and in a sense to build a new world, a new culture together where it was easier to be good and holy.

The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.

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.

The question for me is not are we political, but how are we political? We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage.

The Catholic understanding has been that the death penalty has been become, like, outdated because in industrialized countries. We have other ways of protecting societies from dangerous people without killing them. And in fact, it's important to remember that much of the world has done away with the death penalty.

The end of war begins with people who believe that another world is possible and that another empire has already interrupted time and space and is taking over this earth with the dreams of God.

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.

The problem is that the Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul stuff may feel good, but none of that typical stuff helps when somebody in your neighborhood is murdered.

It's impossible to separate our contemporary practice of the death penalty from our history around race and slavery, and specifically, lynching. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is where executions are happening today. And that's a haunting and eerie thing.

There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.

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.

There are folks who burn the Koran and hold signs saying, "God hates fags" and all sorts of sick things - and they often hijack the headlines with hatred. We know that is not what Christ was like.

We know the Church wasn't born 200 years ago. It's encouraging to see some of the post-denominational churches actually wanting to reconnect with the story and the prayer life of the larger Church.

I'm excited we can be part of making the death penalty history.