Peter

“Ours is a time like the flood, like the exile, when the certitudes abandon us, the old reliabilities have become unsure, and “things fall apart.” The falling part is happening for conservatives, and it is happening for liberals. It is happening all around us, and to all of us.

In such a context of enormous fearfulness, our propensity is to enormous destructiveness. Grow more strident, more fearful, more anxious, more greedy for our own way, more despairing, and consequently, more brutal. That propensity to destructiveness is all around us. On many days we succumb to its power; we succumb to the need to look only after ourselves and our kind, only selfishly, only ideologically, only “realistically.”
― Walter Brueggemann

“Celebrating what we hope for together is better than fighting over what we believe separately.”
― Steven Charleston, Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage

“However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture’s wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self. You are to offer the stranger food and clothing, to guarantee the stranger justice, to treat the stranger like one of your own citizens, to welcome the stranger as Christ in disguise. This is God’s express will in both testaments of the Bible.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

“As Christians, we have become so fixated on our roles as servants that we miss out on the relationships of mutuality that the Spirit wants to knit between people.”
― Anonymous, Subversive Jesus: An Adventure in Justice, Mercy, and Faithfulness in a Broken World