Quotes
“In each case Jesus describes his work as moving outside of polite and proper limits and boundaries to reunite things that have been marginalized or excluded by society: the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the downtrodden.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/aZiW5Tg
“Whatever you trust to validate you and secure you is your real god, and the Gospel is saying, “Will the real God please stand up?””
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/cTaY4f0
“When people say piously, “Thy kingdom come” out of one side of their mouth, they need also to say, “My kingdom go!” out of the other side. The kingdom of God supersedes and far surpasses all kingdoms of self and society or personal reward.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/3baQRCo
To figure out how to get the country past its current impasse, we need to look at reality as it is, not as we imagine it might be. And the reality is that our deep political divide is rooted, first and foremost, in profound and largely irreconcilable views of who America is for and what its social hierarchy should look like. That may be unpleasant for Brooks — and all of us — to contemplate, but reality’s ugliness doesn’t provide an excuse for ignoring it.
“If capital wishes to call labor entitled, capital must acknowledge that it is the most entitled creature in society, craving eternal growth at the cost of the true value of any given service or entity.” – Ed Zitron, The Rot Economy
In the category of just because we can do something doesn’t mean we have to.
The reality is that Fortune 100 companies will hire McKinsey instead of your pro-social firm, because McKinsey’s solutions will increase shareholder value more than your firm’s solutions will. It will always be possible to build A.I. that pursues shareholder value above all else, and most companies will prefer to use that A.I. instead of one constrained by your principles
Source: Ted Chiang, “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” Via Schneier On Security
“We have millions and millions of Christians who have had no experience of God, and the Church, for the most part, prefers it that way. We can then supply beliefs and dogmas as a replacement for encountering a living God. This is part of the reason so many people cling to the Bible or their theological beliefs so firmly. Because, to them, it is the closest thing to God they have ever encountered.”–MARK VAN STEENWYCK, emphasis added
— Jesus Unbound: Liberating the Word of God from the Bible by Giles, Keith,
“During times of war hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism. To even the casual observer during the last war it was obvious that the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese gave many persons in our country an apparent justification for indulging all of their anticolored feelings.”
The United States has been in a state of perpetual war, really ever since World War II. The war is not on on foreign shores about also on our own shores, such as the “War on Drugs.”
— Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
About the church in Laodicea described in Revelation 3:14-22, author Ted Grimsud writes (emphasis added):
“The danger for all the congregations is that they would become indistinguishable from their surrounding culture. In the US, the danger has been that Christianity becomes inextricably identified with the American empire. Then, it seems that the only way to oppose the empire is to reject Christian faith. What a terrible tragedy.”
— To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation by Ted Grimsrud
“It is all good news . . . but you have to go! Israel has always been departing empire. That is how it began back in Egypt and that is how Nebuchadnezzar became the dominant metaphor for imperial power vis-à-vis the peculiar destiny of Israel. That has been the summons of Jesus to his people since his first “follow me.” He summoned away from all old regimes into the new regime that he inaugurated. To make a large, imaginative move, I suggest that it is the task of followers of this gospel in our society—who live in the totalitarian regime of military consumerism with all of its hopes and violences and anxieties—to depart.”
— Journey to the Common Good: Updated Edition by Walter Brueggemann