When Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News wanted to find the origins of Kum-ba-ya, he talked with ethnomusicologist Thomas Miller, who said the song originated as a spiritual among the Gullah, an African-American people who live in the Sea Islands and the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. It’s believed that a missionary couple transported the song to Angola, where it was rediscovered and brought back to the US in the ‘50s and ‘60s. — dallasnews.com
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Howard Zinn
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves . . . (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. — Howard Zinn
John Henry Newman
Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead me Thou on! The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step is enough for me. — John Henry Newman
Margaret Atwood
The facts of this world seen clearly Are seen through tears Why tell me then there is something wrong with my eyes? — Margaret Atwood
Glenn Tinder
The price of a moral posture without personal risk: “It is hard to know, even in one's own case, whether a commitment that costs nothing has any substance. . . . Deploring the poverty of the common people in Asia and Africa is for most of us morally invigorating and at the same time agreeably inexpensive.” — Glenn Tinder
Parker Palmer
It is important to live life from the inside out, not the other way around. That is to say, live your own life, not simply imitating your heroes or other noble imagine. — Parker Palmer
Parker Palmer
Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. — Parker Palmer
Parker Palmer
Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. Of course, the voice we listen for is not “out there,” it is “in here,” calling me to fulfill the selfhood given me at birth by God. Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” — Parker Palmer
Marian Wright Edelman
Asked why she wrote Guide My Feet: This book kind of wrote itself. I started off trying to write a policy book, and while prayer has been an integral part of my life without which I couldn’t survive, it would never have occurred to me to pray out loud or to write a book about prayer and meditations. But, you know, as I sat down to try to write chapters to respond or struggle with Dr. King’s question in his last book—where do we go from here, chaos of community?—I got terrible writer’s cramp and I would find prayers and meditations tumbling out, and so I just let go and let come out what will, and the result is this. I think it reflects my own worry about the spiritual famine in our country.
Carl Sandburg
There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted. — Carl Sandburg