John Shelby
John Shelby
John T. Shelbyis a former center fielder in Major League Baseball who played from 1981 to 1991. His nickname was "T-Bone" for his slight frame. He currently is a coach in the Colorado Rockies minor league system...
doubt world growing
It's not going to be a straight upward progression, but there's no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don't burn witches anymore.
enough said wells
I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's probably not bright enough to recognize all of the implications of what he said.
plato thinking people
What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.
buddhism would-be world
I know that Arnold Toynby, the great historian, said he had always hoped the religions of the world would evolve until they began to bring the very best of each tradition into one tradition. He hoped that Christianity would be the one religion that finally incorporated the values of Hinduism and Buddhism, and enriched itself with them.
interesting people together
The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.
book fighting garden
The first command given by God when Adam and Eve were pitched out of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis is, "Be fruitful and multiply, and subdue the Earth." We've been trying to do that for a long time, and now the Earth is fighting back. I'm not sure that we're going to survive as a species.
government hands interesting
There's one other interesting thing about Western democracy. It didn't arrive at the end point that Karl Marx thought it would that wealth would become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, that eventually the few would be killed by the many who were deprived, and that a different kind of government would then develop. What happened in Western democracy is that we began to understand that a democratic system can't work if half of the people are starving and the other half are dieting.
jesus people tribes
The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references.
jesus writing mean
I find it fascinating that Paul [the apostol], writing to the Galatians, responds to the question, "What does it mean to live in Christ?" by saying, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
north-carolina slavery segregation
I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.
neighbor driven radical
We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.
jesus thinking humanity
I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."
religious people kind
It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?
opinion ends organized
So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.