Ken Sehested

The purpose of God is framed, and the passion of God is fired, in the wounds of the world. That is to say, God bleeds. — Ken Sehested

Christian Wiman

Faith steals upon you like dew: some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxieties, ambitions, distractions. — Christian Wiman

Walter Brueggemann

It happens often among us that praise is either escapist fantasy, or it is a bland affirmation of the status quo. In fact, doxology is a daring political, polemical act that serves to dismiss certain loyalties and to embrace and legitimate other loyalties, and other shapes of reality. — Walter Brueggemann

Miroslav Volf

[T]he economy of undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of moral deserts. — Miroslav Volf

Thomas Kelly

Paradoxically, this total Instruction [God’s Spirit moving in our lives] proceeds in two opposing directions at once. We are torn loose from earthly attachments and ambitions. And we are quickened to a divine but painful concern for the world. He plucks the world out of our hearts, loosening the chains of attachment. And he hurls the world into our hearts, where we and He together carry it in infinitely tender love.

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Elizabeth O’Connor

At the center of our pain, we glimpse a fairer world and hear a call. When we are able to keep company with our own fears and sorrows, we are shown the way to go, our parched lives are watered, and the earth becomes a greener place. Hope begins to grow, and we are summoned to the work that will give us a feeling of wellness and make possible that which we envision.

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St. Ambrose

It was in common and for all, rich and poor, that the earth was created. Why then, O rich, do you take to yourselves the monopoly of owning land? . . . It is not with your wealth that you give alms to the poor, but with a fraction of their own which you give back; for you are usurping for yourself something meant for the common good of all. — St. Ambrose

Vincent Harding

The question of “race is like a bone stuck in our throat, refusing both digestion and explusion, endangering our life.” It is “the unmistakable need and desire of our nation to deal with its terrifying and compelling history, to exorcise the demons of our racial past and present, perhaps even to discover the healing possibilities that reside in our many-hued and wounded variations on the human theme.” — Vincent Harding

Vincent Harding

For it is likely that there can be no resurrections by proxy. Each person and each generation may be called to stand anew—but not alone—at the river. — Vincent Harding

Vincent Harding

Is it really possible that certain kinds of power come to us only as we let go of things rather than accumulate them? — Vincent Harding