Latest Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There's a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Eye, Loss, Self

  Source: www.pbs.org

• When I talk about losing myself, which I did, it's losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my value was to God. I lost all of that at least.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Ideas, Losing, Lost

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Thinking, Self, Order

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I've just quit being religious, because that's what got me into such deep trouble.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Religious, Quitting, Trouble

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Mean, Self, Ego

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Humanity can be pretty stinky.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Humanity, Stinky

  Source: www.pbs.org

• To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Christian, Jesus, Way

  Source: www.pbs.org

• To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Powerful, Your Side, Way

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  People, Trying, Helping

  Source: www.pbs.org

• It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Conflict, Difficult, Tagged

• I don't miss the ministry, because I'm completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  People, Missing, Groups

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Home, Nursing, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Successful, Leaving, Littles

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Christian, Memories, Real

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Memories, Real, Moving

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Meaningful, Character, Church

  Source: www.pbs.org

• To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Community, Church, Knows

  Source: www.pbs.org

• You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Silence, Missing, Solitude

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Community, Pieces, Losing

  Source: www.pbs.org

• That's enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Aunt, Circles, Godmother

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I've relaxed enormously since then. I'm the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Christian, Relaxed, Decided

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Christian, Mean, Followers

  Source: www.pbs.org

• For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Christian, Long, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I'd left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I'd left.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Sorry, People, Ministry

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Moving, Next Day, May

  Source: www.pbs.org