Category: quote
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“Church is not a place where we go to profess our virtue, but one where we go to confess our lack of it.”
Yet if the church is an alternative polis, one of its chief characteristics is the striking failure to be a fully realized moral alternative. Because we receive the Gospel from human hands, our human selfishness and limitations—marked by sin and the pain that comes with it—constitute a significant part of our story. I have seen pinprick glimpses…
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“The devil is a great intellectual.”
Eugene Peterson: It is the devil’s own work to take the stories Jesus told (and the many other stories that provide so much of the content of our Scriptures) and distill them down to a truth or a moral that we can then use without bothering with the way we use them- unconnected from the…
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“Forgetfulness is the easy way out…”
Innocent history is selective forgetfulness, used precisely to avoid the consequences of a more realistic memory… Responsible remembrance, on the other hand, leads to responsible action. A clear example is the repeated injunctions to Israel: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21);…
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“That’s the difference between the mob whipped into a frenzy by a demagogue and the protesters…”
Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to act. Protest of moral and historic force begins with people facing extreme vulnerability. For those who have been silenced, rising to the act of speaking is a perilously high climb indeed. For them,…
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“Many evangelical supporters of Trump have been quick to note that they are not racists…”
For those who think that these impulses are somehow at a great distance from Trump’s campaign and his White House, we need only note the appointment of Stephen Bannon as Trumps strategist and senior counselor, a position with direct access to and great influence over the president. Bannon himself described his own work as a…
David W. Swanson 