Karen Armstrong Quotes About Theology

Quotes about: Theology

• If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.

  Karen Armstrong

  Love, Sympathy, God

  Karen Armstrong (2007). “The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness”, p.212, Anchor

• Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.

  Karen Armstrong

  Unique, Mind, Trying

• You know how it is in the symphony when you are listening to the symphony, the last notes die away, and there's often a beat of silence in the auditorium before the applause begins. It's a very full and pregnant silence. Now theology should bring us to live into that silence, into that pregnant pause.

  Karen Armstrong

  Symphony, Silence, Listening

  "Big Think Interview With Karen Armstrong". Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

• A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

  Karen Armstrong

  Ends, Should, Theology

  "Karen Armstrong Builds A 'Case For God'". Interview with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. September 21, 2009.

• The trouble with a lot of modern theology and a lot of modern thinking about God, is that we think of God a sort of being like ourselves, but bigger and better with likes and dislikes similar to our own.

  Karen Armstrong

  Thinking, Likes And Dislikes, Bigger And Better

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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