Faith & Spirit Quote by Timothy Radcliffe

Radcliffe is doing something deceptively bracing here: he’s shifting religion’s center of gravity away from rulebooks and toward storytelling as social architecture. “Most religions live from a narrative” isn’t pious handwaving; it’s an argument that faith survives by organizing meaning over time - origins, exile, covenant, redemption, enlightenment - and that these plots quietly script how believers treat two forms of alterity: the divine Other and the human other.

The phrasing “divine other” is telling. It suggests God isn’t a possession or a mascot but an encounter that unsettles the self. That’s classic post-Vatican II Catholic sensibility: God as mystery rather than tribal property, relationship rather than metaphysical inventory. Radcliffe, a Dominican known for public theology, is also flagging a temptation inside religion: when narrative hardens into ideology, the “Other” becomes manageable, domesticated, safely on your side.

Then he swivels to “the stranger,” and the quote reveals its real target. The stranger is the stress test for a community’s sacred story. If your narrative teaches that God is radically other - beyond your control, interruptive, merciful - it should make you more porous to people who don’t match your group. If your narrative is mostly about purity, threat, and boundary maintenance, the stranger becomes a problem to solve.

Context matters: this is a cleric speaking in an era of migration politics, culture-war Christianity, and institutional distrust. Radcliffe’s intent reads as both diagnosis and warning: the stories religions tell about God inevitably become stories they tell about outsiders, and those stories have consequences.