To show you … how out of evil there can come good, in those five years I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston...
Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good. Our greed, fear and lasciviousness have enabled us to murder our poets, who are ourselves, to castigate our priests, who are ourselves. The lists of our...
We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into...
On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons he reached out with healing and compassion. He forgave sin, healed the afflicted, cast out...
Every night, reflect on how you have contributed to the good of the world, to the good of another. Try and discern how at any point, you gave a word of encouragement, helped someone find their way, opened up a space for someone to understand, to accept, to love....
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
If God doesn't give up on us, we had better not despair of ourselves. We can always do better--especially if we remember the opposite of despair is not optimism but hope. Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts. But...
White supremacy is evil...the apostle John wrote to the church that we cannot possibly love a God that we cannot see if we do not love our brothers and sisters who we can see.
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority.