{"author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber","total_quotes":52,"quotes":[{"text":"God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of  Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["christmas","reality"],"id":1337,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"I'm more haunted by how what I've said and the things I've done have caused harm to myself and others than I am worried that God will punish me for being bad. Because in the end, we aren't punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["punishment","sin"],"id":15620,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"Jesus says, 'Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.' He says, 'The first shall be last and the last shall be first,' and infuriating things like 'if you seek to find your life you will lose it but those who lose their life will find it.' And every single time I die to something—my notions of my own specialness, my plans and desires for something to be a very particular way—every single time I fight it and yet every single time I discover more life and more freedom than if I had gotten what I wanted.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["freedom","jesus","sacrifice"],"id":38957,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"There's something about courting the darkness that makes some people see the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics tell you a truth you can only see from the underside of the psyche. At its best, comedy is prophesy and societal dream interpretation. At its worst it's just dick jokes.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["comedy","life","pastrix"],"id":55862,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus' baptism, when the devil says to him, 'If you are the Son of God…' he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God. So if God's first move is to give us our identity, then the devil's first move is to throw that identity into question.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["devil","god","identity"],"id":56577,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"Church isn’t perfect. It’s practice.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["christianity","lutheran"],"id":60495,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that's just different.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["boyfriend","christianity","girlfriend","growing-up","in-love","love","romance"],"id":65083,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"When all of  it is given meaning in the larger story of  Jesus Christ, it destroys us, then pours our melted selves back into another form that still bears the marks of  how we got there. Then we become something that can bear light, the brightness of which is not diminished, even when divided and borrowed.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["faith","light"],"id":65780,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"There is a reason Mary is everywhere. I've seen her image all over the world, in cafés in Istanbul, on students' backpacks in Scotland, in a market stall in Jakarta, but I don't think her image is everywhere because she is a reminder to be obedient, and I don't think it has to do with social revolution. Images of  Mary remind us of  God's favor. Mary is what it looks like to believe that we already are who God says we are.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["belief","virgin-mary"],"id":67004,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"},{"text":"God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life.","author":"Nadia Bolz-Weber","tags":["life","prayer"],"id":80210,"author_id":"Nadia+Bolz-Weber"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":52,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}