Sublime
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As the church modeled big business, lay people turned to a gospel that explained how wealth, capitalism, and devotion coincided.
Kate Bowler • Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
The 1950s saw the first financial miracles creep into testimonies and sermons as a patchwork message of competing and complementary explanations about how faith made belief work.
Kate Bowler • Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
Kate Bowler
What if rich did not have to mean wealthy, and whole did not have to mean healed? What if being people of “the gospel” meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough.
Daily Review | Readwise
It focused on the individual rather than groups and emphasized the power of the individual’s mind.
Kate Bowler • Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
adherents, acting in accordance with divine principles, relied on their minds to transform thought and speech into heaven-sent blessings
Kate Bowler • Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
Jesus’ death and resurrection had shifted believers’ ontological status, making them legal shareholders of certain rights and privileges.
Kate Bowler • Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Black metaphysical Christianity entwined racial uplift with the power of the mind.
Kate Bowler • Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
It personalized death, the faculty said, it restored dignity to the undignified process of dying.