James Alison Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.