The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can't, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

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.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

There's not enough wrong with it to leave and there's just enough wrong with it to stay," Matthew later told me. "Fight to change it.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

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 prophesied and societal dream interpretation. At its worst it's just dick jokes.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

We often behave as though Jesus is only interested in saving and loving a romanticized version of ourselves, or an idealized version of our mess of a world, and so we offer to him a version of our best selves. With our Sunday school shoes on, we sing songs about kings and drummers at his birth, perhaps so we can escape the Herod in ourselves and in the world around us. But we've lost the plot if we use religion as the place where we escape from difficult realities instead of as the place where those difficult realities are given meaning.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

What makes us saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

What they don't tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I've never come up with a satisfying explanation for why that is.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

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.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber