I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion as organized in its Churches has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
I was raised Catholic but my father's people were Methodist so we went to both churches.
I have a much wider freer view about spirituality. I feel that people need to pursue it on their own personally. You know let it be theirs - a personal relationship with their soul or their God or with their church.
The key to successful missionary work is a close relationship between the missionaries and the members. Creating an environment in working with members that will bring more into the Church.
There's an ethic that says: 'You don't run off to the church for the sacraments of salvation you establish a personal relationship with God. You don't run off to the courts for justice you settle it yourself. You don't run off to labor unions to sort out your work relations you can take this job and shove it if you don't like what you're doing.'
It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.
There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means basically you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill and the other is David Hare.
The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent at least since the early nineteenth century when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.
I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off but upon our perceptions being made finer so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.