Author: ppadmin

Ultimately, we believe that there is a need for new discourse for how we talk about public policy that needs to be rooted in our moral values. How we treat the poor, women, children. which, he says, extends beyond party lines or religious affiliations. — Rev. William Barber, NC NAACP director and leader of the state’s “Moral Monday” movement

The secret essence of the soul that knows the truth is calling out to God: Beloved . . . strip me of the consolations of my complacent spirituality. Plunge me into the darkness where I cannot rely on any of my old tricks for maintaining my separation. Let me give up on trying to convince myself that my own spiritual deeds are bound to be pleasing to you. Take all my juicy spiritual feelings, Beloved, and dry them up, and then please light them on fire. Take my lofty spiritual concepts and plunge them into darkness, and then burn them. Let me only love you, Beloved. Let me quietly and with unutterable simplicity just love you. — Mirabai Starr

Why am I drawn to desert and mountain fierceness? What impels me to its unmitigated honesty, its dreadful capacity to strip bare, its long, compelling silence? It’s the frail hope that in finding myself brought to the edge…I may hear a word whispered in its loneliness. The word is ‘love,’ spoken pointedly and undeniably to me. It may have been uttered many times in the past but I’m fully able to hear it only in that silence — Belden Lane

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with God. God walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake. — C.S. Lewis

Jack Rogers rightly reminds us that an important test of our theology and our ethics is to ask the question: “Who bleeds?” — Kent Blevins

We tend to forget that in his famous “Beyond Vietnam” sermon at Riverside Church, 4 April 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. claimed that the US is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.” The older he got, the deeper his analysis of the causes of poverty and violence became, the more often he talked about the need for our country to “be born again.” This is the kind of born again faith we need to herald. — Ken Sehested

When Jesus speaks about the world, he is very realistic. He speaks about wars and revolutions, earthquakes, plagues and famines, persecution and imprisonment, betrayal, hatred and assassinations. There is no suggestion at all that these signs of the world’s darkness will ever be absent. But still, God’s joy can be ours in the midst of it all. It is the joy of belonging to the household of God whose love is stronger than death and who empowers us to be in the world while already belonging to the kingdom of joy — Henri Nouwen

When the King puts the poet on the payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet. — Arabic proverb

There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. — Flannery O’Connor