If one is honest about what Jesus says about loving others (including one's enemies) and about sharing one's possessions with others, one has to admit that Jesus wasn't very practical at all. Indeed, he was over-the-top radical. He was far more radical than I like or...
The authors of the Bible did not have enough faith in humankind to believe that unrestrained pursuit of self-interest would promote common welfare. ...Government is the only power of the poor. It is not an intruder on the happy campers on the economic field....
To truly love is to work for a just equity of power between nations, races, and genders, and in our day-to-day relationships and transactions. It is to oppose all patterns of power over another. This is why [Simone] Weil appeals again and again to the ancient symbol...
Female representations of the abundance of God in creating, redeeming, and calling the world to eschatological peace function with prophetic power, challenging everyone to conversion in a new community where Jesus reigns. As the history of religions makes clear,...
Language change is not all-important: if it were, then changing language would be all that was needed to change the world. Nor is it unimportant: if it were, we could concentrate on doing love and justice, and quit worrying about how we speak of God. To separate...
As we participated in protest after protest, sit-in after sit-in, where crowds of uncontrollable angry people swarmed around us yelling and jeering, where we were beaten with billy clubs, lead pipes, trampled by horses, and attacked by dogs, our faith was not...
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial...
Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of...
I believe God dwells with those who make love their aim. And there is no sentimentality in this love; it is not endlessly pliable, always yielding. Prophets from Amos and Isaiah to Gandhi and King have shown how frequently compassion demands confrontation. Love...
Apart from the resurrection, Jesus has no more claim upon us than Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Anwar Sadat: He was simply one among many good leaders who managed to meet an unjust death. from Calendar: Christ’s Time for the...