"To be a follower of Jesus means in the first place to enter by compassion 
	into his experience, with all that it expresses of the divine and of the human. 
	And it means in the second place to enter with him into the suffering and the 
	hope of all human persons, making common cause with them as he does, and seeking 
	out as he does the places of his predilection among the poor and despised and oppressed."    	

	"A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes ... and is completely dependent on the fact 
	that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent."
  	

	"Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, Race to the Moon, S&L Crisis, Korean War, 
	The New Deal, Invasion of Iraq, Vietnam War, NASA."   	

	“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him 
	from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”	   	

	"What can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, 
	and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.”	   	

	"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; 
	courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."  	

	"We must talk about poverty, because people insulated 
	by their own comfort lose sight of it."    	

	"It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends $500,000 for every 
	enemy soldier killed, and only $53 annually on the victims of poverty."	

	“The job of the leader is to get the big ideas right.” 	   	

	"There can be no happiness if the things we believe in 
	are different from the things we do."

	"We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, 
	but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things 
	in and for God."

	“It was easy to know the doctrine. It’s much 
	harder to help a billion people live it.” 	   	

	"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians 
	are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because 
	we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. 
	Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself 
	to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. 
	Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the 
	Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we 
	can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it 
	is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone 
	with the New Testament."

	"Contemporary American churches in particular do not require following Christ 
	in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership—either of entering 
	into or continuing in fellowship of a denomination or a local church.... Most problems 
	in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have not yet 
	decided to follow Christ."   	

	"We need to stop arguing about Christ and start living like Christ."   	

	"What is the value of a Christianity in which Jesus is worshiped as Lord, 
	but Christian discipleship—"the way of Jesus"—is regarded as largely 
	irrelevant to life in the modern world?"
	

	"For Catholics, losing the faith once implied a crisis of belief or a conversion to some other, 
	conflicting outlook.  The process of losing the faith might be prolonged, but ultimately the point 
	came when one rejected Catholic beliefs and practices and adhered to some alternative, whether 
	religious or not.  What worries Catholics today, however, is different: not that the faith will 
	be consciously abandoned but that it will simply be lost in the more literal sense, the way one 
	loses a piece of jewelry or an old memento--by casually setting it aside, mislaying it, leaving 
	its absence long unnoticed, finally discovering that it is irrecoverable."

	"Opportunity is missed by most people because 
	it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."	   	

	"Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end 
	of the day that says, 'I will try again tomorrow.' " 	

	"The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. 
	But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.  Indeed, the 
	United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection 
	of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach 
	to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from 
	writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison 
	sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept 
	incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations."     	

	"Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison 
	and waiting for the rat to die."   	

	"The right to private ownership makes it illegal for a poor person to steal a 
	loaf of bread but perfectly legal for a rich man to hoard more food and other 
	resources than he or she can ever make use of.  Rampant individualism leads to 
	the limitless accumulation of wealth by some while billions of others live in 
	misery and die of starvation.  The rich justify this blatant injustice by claiming
	their right to own as much as they like, no matter how many others are deprived of 
	the bare necessities of life. 'I earned it all without breaking any laws,' they say.  
	'It is mine, and I am not responsible for the lives of other people.' This must 
	be one of the most destructive consequences of individualism.  It destroys millions 
	of people every day."  	

	“The promotion of human rights remains the most effective strategy for eliminating 
	inequalities between countries and social groups, and for increasing security.”	   	

	"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering 
	and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, 
	never the victim. Silence encourages the tormenter, never the tormented." 	

	"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that 
	we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic 
	and servile, but morally treasonable to the American public."  	   	

	"A stock broker who makes bad picks doesn't last too long. A baseball player 
	in an extended slump gets traded. A worker made redundant by cheaper labor 
	abroad or by a new machine--well, she's done for, too. But four years [now 
	five years--editor] after the invasion of Iraq--the greatest blunder in 
	foreign policy since Vietnam--the public apologists and advocates of the 
	war flourish in the media, while the costs of their delusions accrue in body 
	counts and lost treasure. A public that detests the war is relegated to the 
	bleachers, fated to watch from afar the playing out by political and media 
	elites of a game that has been rigged." 	   	

	"Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of 
	being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone."	

	"Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and 
	seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is 
	active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian 
	into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and 
	hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice 
	to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love."   	

	"I have never liked the phrase that says we're just made of dust and 
	return to dust.  We are energy, which is interchangeable with light.  
	We are fire and water and earth.  We are air and atoms and quarks.  
	Moreover, we are dreams, hopes, and fears held together by wisdom and 
	driven apart by folly."   	

	"A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking.  But he became 
	more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening."		

	"Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, 
	those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, 
	can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are 
	questioning."

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