Recent

Anthony DeMello

What I really enjoy is not you; it’s something that’s greater than both you and me. It is ​something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn’t stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I’m alone, it continues to play. There’s a greater repertoire and it never cease to play. — Anthony DeMello

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image. — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

David Woodyard

[Frederic K.] Herzog has an important interpretation of the passage in John 3:1-21 where the issue of being born again appears. Conservatives have traditionally reduced the narrative to, “Have you found Jesus?” The individual is set apart and privatized. Herzog centers on, “Have you found your neighbor?” De-privatization occurs in community. To be born again is to enter into a new relationship with oneself, one that is corporate and in solidarity with others, especially the powerless and the poor. And it is a selfhood with open borders.

Thomas R. Kelly

The heart is stretched through suffering, and enlarged. But O the agony of this enlarging of the heart, that one may be prepared to enter into the anguish of others!…The cross as dogma is painless speculation; the cross as lived suffering is anguish and glory. Yet God, out of the pattern of his own heart, has planted the cross along the road of holy obedience. And he enacts in the hearts of those he loves the miracle of willingness to welcome suffering and to know it for what it is—the final seal of his gracious love. — Thomas R. Kelly

Søren Kierkegaard

Christ willed to be the socially insignificant one. The fact that he descended from heaven to take upon himself the form of a servant is not an accidental something which now is to be thrust into the background and forgotten. No, every true follower of Christ must express existentially the very same thing – that insignificance and offense are inseparable from being a Christian. As soon as the least bit of worldly advantage is gained by preaching or following Christ, then the fox is in the chicken house. — Søren Kierkegaard

Oscar Romero

The guarantee of one’s prayer is not in saying a lot of words. The guarantee of one’s petition is very easy to know: how do I treat the poor? The degree to which you approach them, and the love with which you approach them, or the scorn with which you approach them – that is how you approach your God. What you do to them, you do to God. The way you look at them is the way you look at God. — Oscar Romero

Daniel Berrigan

We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want peace with half a heart, and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its very nature, is total—but the waging of peace, by our cowardice, is partial. . . . Of course, let us have the peace, we cry, but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties. — Daniel Berrigan

David Hartsough

It is much cheaper to make friends than to fight enemies. — David Hartsough

David Hartsough

I took part in organizing a silent worship service in the gallery of the U.S. Senate, while the legislators below us debated and voted for more funding for the war [in Vietnam]. When the vote was over, we were arrested on a charge of "praying without a permit." — David Hartsough

David Hartsough

I remembered Bayard Rustin, a conscientious objector who had served time in prison during the Second World War and then became a leader in the civil rights movement, saying that being a pacifist is one-tenth conscientious objection and nine-tenths working to do away with the things that make for war. — David Hartsough