Quotes
“It is our propensity, in society and in church, to trust the narrative of scarcity. That is what makes us greedy, and exclusive, and selfish, and coercive. Even the Eucharist can be made into an occasion of scarcity, as though there were not enough for all. Such scarcity leads to exclusion at the table, even as scarcity leads to exclusion from economic life.”
— Journey to the Common Good: Updated Edition by Walter Brueggemann
Below refers to the writing of Lincoln Steffens in 1904, and very apt questions at the end of 2022. Emphasis added
“After Steffens laid out the corruption of seven cities, his conclusion pointed straight at readers in their easy chairs. The simple truth, Steffens wrote, was that politicians were expert readers of public demands, and the public had not demanded good government. Instead, for decades they had been driven by outrage, alternately between political parties, throwing out one set of bums, then the other. Steffens asked: “Do we Americans really want good government? Do we know it when we see it? Are we capable of that sustained good citizenship which alone can make democracy a success?””
— The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 by Jon Grinspan
“A community so addicted to consumption that it foregoes virtually every other pleasure and responsibility needs the intercession of a power great enough to reveal and tame the addiction. “God” is the place-holding holding word for the power that interrupts the tyranny of evil in all of its forms.”
— The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth by Wendy Farley
“Remember, Madison and the other authors of The Federalist Papers didn’t think amendments to their new Constitution were necessary. More than that, they thought a bill of enumerated rights could be dangerous. They worried that if they specified a few rights, some fools in the future would conclude that their list of rights were the only rights people had or should have. They worried that the federal government would grow to take power over everything but the few special carve-outs they bothered to enumerate.”
Like privacy and personal autonomy.
— Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal
“If we take the future as our starting point for thinking about God, creation, and humanity—then everything we know must … be realigned to an evolving universe, including our theologies, philosophies, economic and political systems, cultural matrices—in short, our planetary life.”
— Sr. Ilia Delio, as quoted in Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned by Brian D. McLaren
“Two thousand years after Jesus launched a subversive spiritual movement of equality, emancipation, and peace, two thousand years after women were among his inner circle and the first messengers of resurrection, two thousand years after Jesus defended Mary of Bethany’s place in the all-male circle of disciples, the Christian religion still remains subservient to patriarchy and the authoritarian control it engenders.”
— Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned by Brian D. McLaren
“One of the paradoxes of empire in our own time is that people often assume that we are now closer to freedom than ever before.”
— Christ & Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times by Joerg Rieger
“The Christian faith is different from what the world teaches. The Christian faith is not “seeing is believing,” but rather, “believing is seeing.” We must open our eyes and hearts and see Jesus’s presence in our lives. We need to see him in the places that we dare not to look and dare not to think about.”
— Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence by Diana Butler Bass
“Hope means that things are neither steered mightily unto good by an invisible wisdom nor hollowed out at their center by some primordial catastrophe and doomed to fail. Hope means that things are just unstable, risky, nascent, natal, betokening neither an absolute plenum nor an absolute void.”
— Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim by John D. Caputo a.co/dVzzJ1W
Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb
Vogue has a great interview of Amanda from before the inaugaration.