James Alison famous quotes

Give people a common enemy, and you will give them a common identity. Deprive them of an enemy and you will deprive them of the crutch by which they know who they are.
-- James Alison

#People #Giving #Enemy

My own belief is that being gay is a regularly occurring nonpathological minority variant in the human condition, and that an appropriate analogy is left-handedness, which also, as it happens, used to be regarded as some sort of defect in a normatively right-handed humanity.
-- James Alison

#Gay #Humanity #Minorities

I'm trying to make the case that the church can indeed, from within its own resources, move out of a false, and often a hateful, characterization of and set of attitudes toward gay and lesbian people.
-- James Alison

#Attitude #Moving #Gay

I'm not sure that I've ever been drawn to the academic life as such. Theology has been a matter of survival for me. If I have a carapace of academic presentability, it is thanks to the wonderful teachers I had.
-- James Alison

#Teacher #Academic Life #Survival

The silence of those in positions of influence in the church who know, or have a strong suspicion, that being gay is a nonpathological minority variant in the human condition drives me crazy, far crazier than I am driven by any loud-mouthed purveyor of hateful nonsense.
-- James Alison

#Strong #Crazy #Gay

I think I have quite traditional views on original sin, grace, and the real but difficult nature of we humans being able to learn something true about being human that we didn't know before. And yet the consequences of this traditional view are really quite radical.
-- James Alison

#Real #Thinking #Views

Part of my motivation in the search for a cause of being gay was the need to find "something that has gone wrong that I can put right," and it was good, spiritually fruitful, to discover that the question "What went wrong in where I came from?" is actually not a useful one.
-- James Alison

#Motivation #Gay #Needs

I'm honestly not sure that I've ever tried to talk as a theologian about "homosexual acts," per se. My disagreement with the current teaching of the Roman Congregations is about what I consider to be their fundamentally flawed premise of the objectively disordered nature of the inclination.
-- James Alison

#Teaching #Currents #Homosexual

I'm not much of a multitasker, and when I'm in productive mode, organizational things suffer.
-- James Alison

#Suffering #Organizational #Productive

There's the South Pole, said Christopher Robin, and I expect there's an East Pole and a West Pole, though people don't like talking about them.

There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

Television gives us the gift to see ourselves as we'd like to be seen.

The chief danger of the Church today is that it is trying to get on the same side as the world, instead of turning the world upside down. Our Master expects us to accomplish results, even if they bring opposition and conflict. Anything is better than compromise, apathy, and paralysis.  God give to us an intense cry for the old-time power of the Gospel and the Holy Ghost!

There is not a command God gives to His children for which He does not provide the enablement for obedience.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

If a boxer ever went as crazy as Nijinsky all the wowsers in the world would be screaming 'punch-drunk.' Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn't there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs

I am a big admirer of Sachin and his personality. He is a source of inspiration for the country and just looking at his photographs gives a lot of positive vibes.

I know I have plenty of enemies, but I'd rather be the most-hated winning coach in the country than the most-popular losing one.