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Richard Rohr

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Famous Richard Rohr Quotes

“We cannot avoid the globalization of knowledge and information. When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, I could never think about a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or Muslim, or even a Protestant - I grew up in such a Catholic ghetto. That's not possible anymore, unless you live in a cave or something. So either we have knowledge of what the other religions and other denominations are saying, and how they tie into the common thread, or we end up just being dangerously ignorant of other people and therefore prejudiced.”

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“Everything has to be understood in opposition to something else. For some dang reason, the ego prefers to make one side better than the other, so we choose. And we decide males are better than females, America is better than Canada, Democrats are better than Republicans. And for most people, once this decision is made, it is amazing the amount of blindness they become capable of. They really don't see what's right in front of them. Once you see this, it's an amazing breakthrough, and that is the starting place for moving away from dualistic thinking.”

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“People who think they can just do a non-stop flight to mystical, non-dual thinking, to get it out without going through the process, are usually not right. That's airy-fairy thinking. They have to wait until they are hurt themselves, or they are cheated, or lied to or betrayed, and they will see that their non-dual thinking is not tested, or truly a gift of the spirit. It's simply fuzzy thinking.”

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“We don't have much wisdom about the second half when things really open up and end up looking a lot more progressive. In my own Catholic church, for example, we're sort of circling the wagons today by thinking that more moral strictures, more exclusionary rules on this or that, that that's going to do for the first half of life. I don't think it really does.”

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“If you're the head of the organization that has to pay salaries, bills and keep the money coming, you have to be concerned with pleasing the middle. I find it means you have to dumb down your message to something less radical than the gospel. It can't be the real gospel. It has to be "churchiness" that pleases everyone, so they come back next Sunday and keep putting money in the collection plate. I don't mean that in a cynical way. I just think it's what happens.”

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“G.K. Chesterton, who was part of a Catholic conservatism that was kind and loving, not reactionary or hateful, said "We're all in the same boat in a stormy sea and we owe each other a terrible loyalty." I think that's profoundly true, yet it's difficult to have civil dialogue right now with other Christians, so how can we possibly talk to "all the nations"?”

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“My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.”

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