Top 50 Jamie Arpin-Ricci Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Shalom is what love looks like in the flesh. The embodiment of love in the context of a broken creation, shalom is a hint at what was, what should be, and what will one day be again. Where sin disintegrates and isolates, shalom brings together and restores. Where fear and shame throw up walls and put on masks, shalom breaks down barriers and frees us from the pretense of our false selves.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

2. “There is more hope in honest brokenness than in the pretense of false wholeness.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

3. “An unattended grief all too easily becomes poisonous guilt and shame.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

4. “Forgiveness and consequences are not mutually exclusive.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

5. “When you’re accustomed to being considered ‘normal’, difference feels like a perversion.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

6. “If our desire for justice is not rooted primarily in the pursuit of restoration, then reconciliation will be nearly impossible to achieve. It is precisely because grace is undeserved that makes it grace.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

7. “Deviant’ is the weapon of the normative to discredit and demonize the Other.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

8. “If our social justice is guided by retribution, we will simply perpetuate the use and abuse of power to inflict violence.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

9. “The weaponization of belonging is one of the most “anti-christ” dynamics I have ever encountered.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

10. “The fire of fear blazes with the fuel of ignorance leaving nothing but the ashes of hate behind.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

11. “Disgust is a learned behaviour that finds fertile soil in ignorance, yielding a bountiful harvest of alienation, oppression, and hate.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

12. “One of the deadliest tools of powerful systems is narrow definitions of what is “normal” and the reduction of difference to deviance.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

13. “It is entirely possible to work for justice without thirsting for blood.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

14. “It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

15. “The seeds of liberation are planted across the common table as we break bread together.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

16. “We celebrate the differences among us, even that which we cannot reconcile, not in denial of the absolute, but in the gift of humility that those differences require of us. Without denying our differences, we no longer allow them to categorize or divide us. It is in the diversity that the image of God is most fully reflected in and through us.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

17. “There is nothing like the moving solidarity of survivors to bring out seemingly boundless impulse to deflect, deny, and defend.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

18. “By making God more monstrous than us, we circumvent the need for redemption.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

19. “I prefer open hostility to the poisonous silence of supposed neutrality.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

20. “Incarnation is good news not because it offers us a way out of the mess of this world, but because it shows us what God’s love looks like here and now.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

21. “The excesses of identity politics pale in comparison to the monolithic normative realities that dominate our culture.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

22. “The level of ‘acceptable’ dishonesty we Christians allow to avoid facing uncomfortable truths betrays our ideals as shallowly held.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

23. “Do we honestly believe that the best witness we can have as Christians before a watching world is to show moral perfection? While that might convince some, our odds of pulling it off seem less than slim. In truth, the most compelling witness to our faith can be a willingness to humbly accept responsibility for our failings and seek to restore relationships at any cost.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

24. “Tolerance is a poor substitute for embrace.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

25. “If you think it is more important to be moral than loving, you probably don’t understand what either word really means.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

26. “You are not obligated to be an apologist for your life.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

27. “Agreeing to disagree’ isn’t license to hold hateful and condemning beliefs about me as though it doesn’t negatively impact our relationship.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

28. “The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us – poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction – where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

29. “Rather than elevating poverty to a form of righteousness, Jesus is instead calling for a revolution of imagination around the nature of what we consider true blessing.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

30. “The healthy introvert understands that their personality is not a deterministic, fixed reality that they are powerless against. Being an introvert is never an excuse to shirk responsibility or to justify bad habits.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

31. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not colonize it.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

32. “When you assume the goodness in one group is an exception but believe the goodness in your group is the norm, you’re probably being prejudiced.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

33. “Sometimes the silence of God is simply Him waiting for us to accept what we already know to know right and true.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

34. “One of the clearest indications of privilege is the freedom to opt out.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

35. “When circumstances demand that we do something that is not natural to our temperament or talents, we must sometimes intentionally choose by discipline what we inherently lack by nature.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

36. “It’s important to take life very seriously. That is why we must laugh at every opportunity.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

37. “If your orthodoxy doesn’t fully affirm compassion- if it is not, itself, deeply compassionate- then it is no orthodoxy at all.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

38. “Strength of conviction for ones faith is celebrated by the church- except when that conviction runs contrary to the status quo.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

39. “Civility is an affectation if it is not informed by some deeper quality of character.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

40. “God is less interested in you performing well and more interested in seeing you flourish.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

41. “When I realized that I was an introvert and what that meant, I actually became more outgoing, more confident in social situations, and began to enjoy scenarios I used to find unbearable. Why? Because, in understanding what I needed with respect to replenishing my energy, I was able to set limits and boundaries that freed me to be more engaged.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

42. “When Mary asserts explicitly that God is on the side of the poor, we can understand it within the tension of what it means to be blessed as the poor in spirit. Rather than elevating poverty to a form of righteousness, Jesus is instead calling for a revolution of imagination around the nature of what we consider true blessing. Jesus is here declaring that the humble and repentant heart is the fertile soil of his kingdom.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

43. “Compassion without a commitment to justice is not compassion at all.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

44. “As a pastor, I do not speak for my community. I speak from it.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

45. “Often it is the poor who recognize emptiness before the rest of us – and for obvious reasons. While I am not suggesting that poverty predisposes people to some form of righteousness, I have seen how their circumstances often free them from much of the pretense that our relative privilege affords us. So while the poor are not godlier on the basis of their poverty, they are often at least more authentic in their brokenness, and thus, perhaps, closer to honestly recognizing what true emptiness is.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

46. “You see, my son,” continues Kolbe softly, “the saints are not so different than you or me. Their stories reveal them to be very much human. However, this frailty does not weaken their witness or holiness, but rather extends to us the invitation to the same life amid our own frailty.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

47. “When belonging is weaponized to coerce conformity and submission it ceases to be belonging at all, corrupting any hope of true community.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

48. “Allyship born of heroism- not altruism- will ultimately be performative and harmful.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

49. “Individual accountability is not a substitute for systemic change.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci

50. “The fact is this: If “everyone is a little bit bisexual”, then it would be equally true to nobody is gay, straight, or otherwise. However, most of us wouldn’t go that far. Why? Because the logic is almost exclusively applied to bisexuality and is an expression of bisexual erasure. And in some cases, when connected to the fetishization of bisexual women, it is an outcropping of misogyny and patriarchy. This kind of mentality is deeply harmful and must be resisted.”

— Jamie Arpin-Ricci