James Talarico

religion shouldn't lead to itself religion should lead you deeper into your own life and to me that is such a gift that you can give a young person can you say more about what that means to you yeah so you know i think for christianity i'll just speak about my tradition the genius

the miracle of Christianity, is not the claim that Jesus is God.

It's that God is Jesus, meaning Jesus helps us understand the mystery.

A mystery can't help us understand Jesus.

So this idea that ultimate reality, the ground of our being, the cosmos, however you want to define God, that that somehow looks like this humble, compassionate, barefoot rabbi in the first century.

someone who broke cultural norms, someone who stood up for the vulnerable and the marginalized, someone who challenged religious authority.

That to me is such a revolutionary idea and it leads you to challenge organized religion.

The gospel just inherently tries to break out of some of these religious dogmas and orthodoxies and challenges religion itself.

The separation of church and state, I was taught that that constitutional boundary was sacred.

not for the benefit of the state, although there's benefits to our democracy, but for the benefit of the church.

Because when religion gets too cozy with power, we lose our prophetic voice, our ability to see beyond the current systems, the current era.

One of my favorite verses in the New Testament is in the Sermon on the Mount.

I encourage everyone to go back and read it, especially as Christianity is more and more in our political conversation.

Go back and read Christianity 101, which is the Sermon on the Mount.

And it's interesting because Jesus takes his followers not into a church, not into a business, not into a governmental building.

He brings people to a hillside.

And he says, look at the birds of the air.

Look at the lilies of the field.

This is how we're supposed to live.

This is who we truly are.