Eugene H. Peterson Religious Quotations

You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.

The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders; in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, covetousness and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account.

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.

The vocation of pastor(s) has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.

Real faith is refined in the fires and storms of pain.