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

Anais Mitchell

Why Do We Build The Wall . . . What do we have that they should want? We have a wall to work upon. We have work and they have none. And our work is never done. My children, My children. And the war is never won. The enemy is empathy. And the wall keeps out the enemy. And we build the wall to keep us free. That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free. — Anais Mitchell

Danielle Steel

Sometimes, if you aren't sure about something, you have to just jump off the bridge and grow wings on your way down. — Danielle Steel

Ivan J. Kauffman

We must acknowledge the essential defect in the just war tradition, which is the assumption that violence can somehow achieve justice. And we must with equal courage acknowledge the essential defect in pacifism, which is the assumption that justice can somehow be achieved simply by opposing violence. — Ivan J. Kauffman

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

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