When you wake up in the morning called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.
NME, May 19, 2001
"If there is a devil at work, then he rests in institutions and not in individuals. Because the beauty of institutions is that any individual can abdicate responsibility. The assumption that we're all utterly powerless, that's the devil at work."
Blessed are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings of Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness
“Any observer would have to say that Christianity is fashionable at present in the United States. This might be a good thing, except that the observer, observing more closely, would have to conclude that, to the extent that Christianity is fashionable, it is loosely fashionable. It seems to have remarkably little to do with the things that Jesus Christ actually taught.
Especially among Christians in positions of great wealth and power, the idea of reading the gospels and keeping Jesus‘s commandments, as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective ‘Christian.’”
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
[Disinformation] is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise . . . If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone’s contact with reality, probably your own included.
Nobel Peace Prize 1998
Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace – respect for diversity.
Little Did I Know
“Advice on being human. Do not stomach what you have no taste for, for you will develop the taste.”
Summer Meditations
“Anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions, but I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”
“Invitation,” A Thousand Mornings
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
“If the church stays silent in the face of what is happening, what difference would it make if no church were ever opened again?”
A Way Other than Our Own: Devotions for Lent, comp. Richard Floyd
"…the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence."
On Freedom
Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance of understanding it.
"Free to Be" (from Circles in the Stream)
"Can it be so hard
To love yourself without thinking
Someone else holds a lower card?"
Anna Karenina
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Faith, Hope, and Carnage
I think in a way my work has become an explicit rejection of cynicism and negativity. I simply have no time for it. I mean that quite literally, and from a personal perspective. No time for censure or relentless condemnation. No time for the cycle of perpetual blame. Others can do that sort of thing. I haven't the stomach for it, or the time. Life is too damn short, in my opinion, not to be awed.
The Powers That Be
The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favour those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must have the favour of the gods.
I never have been in despair about the world. Enraged. I've been enraged by the world, but never despair. I cannot afford despair...you can't tell the children that there is no hope.
Faith, Hope and Carnage
So, essentially, what I am trying to present is the idea of grief as a gift. Grief as a positive force. Grief that can become, if we allow it its full expression, a defiant, sometimes mutinous energy.
Peter Maurin (2010). “Easy Essays”, p.61, Wipf and Stock Publishers
“The future will be different if we make the present different.”
34th Kennedy Center Honors 2011
Every day, I make an effort to go towards what I don't understand.
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“You can't see the future coming -- not the terrors, for sure, but you also can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all...is grace.”