Harvey Cox Quotes

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . .

What we are seeking so frantically elsewhere may turn out to be the horse we have been riding all along.

Secularism is not only indifferent to alternative religious systems, but as a religious ideology it is opposed to any other religious systems. It is therefore a closed system.

Somewhere deep down we know that in the final analysis, we do decide things and that even our decisions to let someone else decide are really our decisions, however pusillanimous.

We now live in a 'post-Christian' America . The Judeo-Christian ethic no longer guides our social institutions. Christian ideals and values no longer dominate social thought and action. The Bible has ceased to be a common base of moral authority for judging whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable.

"Religion" can no more be equated with what goes on in churches than "education" can be reduced to what happens in schools or "health care" restricted to what doctors do to patients in clinics. The vast majority of healing and learning goes on among parents and children and families and friends, far from the portals of any school or hospital. The same is true for religion. It is going on around us all the time. Religion is larger and more pervasive than churches.

Not to decide is to decide.

The political is replacing the metaphysical as the characteristic mode of grasping reality.

God laughs, it seems, because God knows how it all turns out in the end.

Man must now assume the responsibility for his world. He can no longer shove it off on religious power.

The real ecumenical crisis today is not between Catholics and Protestants but between traditional and experimental forms of church life.

The comic, more than the tragic, because it ignites hope, leads to more, not less, participation in the struggle for a just world.

Secular Humanism is opposed to other religions; it actively rejects, excludes, and attempts to eliminate traditional theism from meaningful participation in the American culture.

There has never been a better raconteur than Jesus of Nazareth.

Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back.

It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.

Instead of a 'Western Christianity,' we now witness a post-Christian West (in Europe) and a post-Western Christianity (in the global South). America is somewhere in between.

Your reach should always exceed your grasp.

I am dead against trying to keep religious conservatives out of the political debate. The tactic of exclusion is self-defeating.