Author: ppadmin

The strong do as they can, while the weak suffer what they must. — Thucydides

On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." — Chalmers Johnson

If I adore You out of fear of hell, burn me in hell. If I adore You out of desire for paradise, lock me out of paradise. But if I adore You alone, do not deny to me Your eternal beauty. — Rabia al-Adawiyya, 8th century Sufi mystic

How does blood cleanse, if it is not a matter of revenge? “Washed in the blood of the Lamb” always seems a strange, powerful image to me. I was listening to an old folk spiritual recently, “Wayfaring Stranger,” and I wondered if the wildness and mystery of such traditional Christian images hasn’t gone underground. The song contains this verse: I want to wear a crown of glory When I get home to that good land. I want to shout salvation’s story In concert with the blood-washed band. Shouting salvation’s story has been in vogue lately as a way to secular power, but does our nation, led by a president who calls Jesus his favorite philosopher, still know the difference between a blood-washed and a blood-soaked band? Whatever kind of band we are, the blood has to be hidden. For at the very moment that our society has become more sophisticated at inflicting violence and at fictionalizing it for entertainment, real violence is less visible. — Dan Finlay

I will tell you something about stories they aren’t just entertainment they are all we have to fight off illness and death we don’t have anything if we don’t have the stories their evil is mighty, but it can’t stand up to our stories so they try to make us confused or forget them they would like that because then we would become defenseless. — Leslie Silko

When my thirst got great enough to ask, a stream welled up inside; some jade wave buoyed me forward and I found myself upright in the instant, with a garden inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs. The vines push out plump grapes. You are loved, someone said, take that and eat it. — Mary Karr

What shall we do, we who are at war but are asked to pretend we are not? — Marvin Bell

You can chase down all your enemies, bring them to their knees, you can bomb the world to pieces but you can't bomb it into peace. — Michael Franti

Linda Wertheimer (National Public Radio): Why did you think that a book of prayers was a good place to start for this kind of conversation about the way we ought to be? Marian Wright Edelman (director of Children’s Defense Fund): Well, I didn’t start out that way. This book [Guide My Feet] kind of wrote itself. As I said in the introduction, I started off trying to write a policy book, and while prayer has been an integral part of my life without which I couldn’t survive, it would never have occurred to me to pray out loud or to write a book about prayer and meditations. But, you know, as I sat down to try to write chapters to respond or struggle with Dr. King’s question in his last book—where do we go from here, chaos of community?—I got terrible writer’s cramp and I would find prayers and meditations tumbling out, and so I just let go and let come out what will, and the result is this. But I think it reflects my own worry about the spiritual famine in our country. I think it reflects the spiritual hunger I sense among young people and older people who feel that there’s something missing in this celebrity crazed, material-thing crazed society, and we’re looking for something deeper. And so it was a spontaneous offering and sharing which is as surprising to me as I’m sure it will be to many readers. — Marian Wright Edelman