Accidental Saints by Bolz-Weber Nadia

(New York: Canterbury Press, 2015), 224

  • "I have come to realize that all the saints I've known have been accidental ones—people who inadvertently stumbled into redemption like they were looking for something else at the time, people who have just a wee bit of a drinking problem and manage to get sober and help others to do the same, people who are as king as they are hostile." (7)
  • "There are times when the truth won't let us go." (17)
  • "The Blessed Exchange [God gathers all our sin into his own self and transforms death into life] (and not substitutionary atonement [Jesus standing in for us to take a really bad spanking from God]) always just made so much more sense to me as an idea." (17)
  • "I am unqualified to be an example of anything but needing Jesus...Those most qualified to speak the gospel are those who truly know how unqualified they are to speak the gospel." (29-30)
  • "Your weakness is fertile ground for a forgiving God to make something new and to make something beautiful, so don't every think that all you have to offer are your gifts." (38)
  • "No one gets to play Jesus but we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others' needs and have our own needs met. we are all the needy and the ones who meet needs. To place ourselves or anyone else in only one category is to lie to ourselves." (48)
  • "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." (70)
  • "We have 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." (75)
  • "Keep Herod in Christmas" to remember the broken world that Jesus entered into to redeem. (76-77)
  • Unsure about demons (85), but "The holy things we need for healing and sustenance are almost always the same as the ordinary things right in front of us." (92)
  • "I wonder if we lost more than we realized when we started hiring professionals to do for us what we used to do for ourselves." (112 cf. self-competence)
  • The message of Ash Wednesday: "We come from God and to God we shall go." (112)
  • "In the end, the only real love in the world is found when you let yourself be truly known." (124)
  • "We aren't punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins." (130)
  • "In times when we have no words, when we don't know what to think because we are feeling too many things all at once, there's always the liturgy, the words of God's people that have rung through the millennia and that can speak on our behalf—words we can borrow for ourselves." (157)
  • "Fear of [a bad outcome] was torturing me and was, in the end, way worse than [the bad outcome itself]." (179)
  • "Receiving grace is basically the best shitty feeling in the world." (179)
  • "We have to be deeply rooted in tradition in order to innovate with integrity." (206)

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Created: 2026-02-02-Mon
Updated: 2026-02-28-Sat