Religious matters are to be separated from the jurisdiction of the state, not because they are beneath the interests of the state but, quite to the contrary, because they are too high and holy and thus are beyond the competence of the state.
It's a dangerous thing, though, to confuse the church with God. The church is not and never has been divine, even in the moments where it has been a channel for healing and hope and change. But while I stand by those words, the truth is that I have never been able to...
Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence....
The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
Life is against all dualisms; life is one. ...Always, against all that fragments and shatters, and against all things that separate and divide within and without, life labors to meld together into a single harmony.
God is not a being separate from the human. If you do not and cannot see God in the face of the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned, then you cannot see God at all. God is not an external being; God is present in the faces of the least of...
[Acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize:] This award is for mothers, who sit at railway stations to try to eke out an existence, selling potatoes, selling mealies, selling produce. This award is for you, fathers, sitting in a single-sex hostel,...
The peace you lack is not with God, but with yourself. You are not separated from God; you are separated from you. Your challenge is not overcoming your original badness, but staking claim to your original goodness. from Notes from (Over) the Edge