Stop worrying about whose name gets in the paper and start doing something about rats, and day care and low wages. . . . We must try to take our task more seriously and ourselves more lightly. — Dorothy I. Height, 98, a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades.
Author: ppadmin
Robert C. Koehler
“Why are we violent, but not illiterate?” This question, originally posed by writer Colman McCarthy, was asked at the Midwest Regional Department of Peace conference, which was held last weekend outside Detroit. It cuts to the core of our troubles. The answer is agonizingly obvious: “We’re taught to read!” Could it be we also need to be taught, let us say, calmness, breath and impulse control, practical applications of the Golden Rule? But until we know enough to ask these questions, violence, like ignorance, is just a fact of life. — Robert C. Koehler
Annie Dillard
There is no one to send, not a clean hand nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us. . . . — Annie Dillard
Slavoj Zizek
. . . the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism. — Slavoj Zizek
John Howard Yoder
To avoid revolution means to take the side of the establishment. To say that the church should not meddle with the problem of open housing is to conclude that the house owner and the real estate agent, even if members of the churches, receive no concrete moral guidance from beyond themselves. To say that it is not the business of the church to second-guess the experts on details of political or military strategy, to have judgments on the moral legitimacy of particular laws, is to give one’s blessing to whatever goes on. Those who object to the church’s having something to say about economies, especially if that be critical of the existing capitalistic order, have no qualms about seeing the church on the other side of the economic question, or about economies having a say in the life of the churches.
Read more ›Charles Mathewes
We might call this the “Eisenhower strategy” [of public theology], or its general attitude is encapsulated in Eisenhower’s (in)famous claim, “our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith and I don’t care what it is.” — Charles Mathewes
Barbara Brown Taylor
Prayer is more than something I do. The longer I practice prayer, the more I think it is something that is always happening, like a radio wave that carries music through the air whether I tune in to it or not. — Barbara Brown Taylor
David Steindl-Rast
[P]ain is a small price to pay for freedom from self-deception. — David Steindl-Rast
Kathleen Norris
For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed and take us to places where we didn’t want to go.
Read more ›Wendell Berry
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do. — Wendell Berry