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Christian mysticism is neither a kind of pantheistic infinity mysticism, nor an esoteric mysticism of exaltation, tending toward the self-redemption of the individual soul. It is—putting it extremely—a mysticism of human bonding. The God of Christian faith is found only in the movement of God’s love toward persons, “the least,” as has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Only in this movement do we find the supreme nearness, the supreme immediacy of God. And that is why mysticism, which seeks this nearness, has its place not outside, beside, or above responsibility for the world, but in the center of it.

[Attempts to separate “spiritual” concerns and “social/political” concerns] . . . have been front and center ever since Pharaoh unsuccessfully tried to persuade Moses that religion had nothing to do with Egypt’s domestic policy on the status of nonindentured servants.

The best definition of the Gospel message I ever heard is that the Gospel is the permission and command to enter difficulty with hope.

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.

For all their engagement with civil society, then, most Christians support it fundamentally as an addendum, an “alien work” whose reality does not internally flower from the logic of their own existence, either as citizens or as believers. . . . They practically admit civic life’s importance, but cannot fully explain its import in a satisfactorily theological manner.

Conservatives have traditionally reduced [the “born again” text of John 3:16] to, “Have you found Jesus?” The individual is set apart and privatized. [Frederic K.] Herzog centers on “Have you found your neighbor?” . . . To be born again is to enter into a relationship with oneself, one that is corporate and in solidarity with others, especially the powerless and poor.

The Kingdom is otherworldly only in the sense that its origin and values lie in the divine order, and because of this its earthly appearance is marked by struggle.

[W]orship does not create an “alternative world” to which we can retreat when ordinary life becomes intolerable. . . . When liturgy becomes a self-absorbed attempt at “religious behavior” or when it calls attention to itself as something “unworldly,” it ceases to be worship and becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Christian worship is inherently worldly. Its primary symbols are drawn from the messiest activities of human life: giving birth and dying, washing and smearing bodies with oil, eating and drinking, unburdening one’s heart in the presence of another. All this is the septic stuff of the world’s drama—and the stuff of Christian liturgy as well.

So there is a movement from the soul to God, from God to the soul, and from the soul to society and the world. The contemplative life can never be one of self-indulgent absorption, even of a purely personal absorption in and enjoyment of God. Rather there must be an active expression of the inward union and love in relation to the world.

Regard the flesh, the body, matter, as evil, or even inferior, and one has already begun the deviation from Christian truth.