85 Quotes by Elaine Pagels

Christmas lights, again, piercing like knives. The spirit of that season was never more remote than during those dark December days.

No longer married, suddenly I was widowed. From Latin, the name means "emptied." Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body.

I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world.

Times of mourning displace us from ordinary life.

For those who find suffering inevitable--in other words, for any of us who can't dodge and pretend it's not there--acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me.

So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death.

[T]he biblical creation story, like the creation stories of other cultures, communicates social and religious values and presents them as if they were universally valid.

I an not saying that religious ideas are nothing but a cover for political motives [...]. Instead, I intend to show that religious insights and moral choices, in actual experience, coincide with practical ones.

What each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical.