Charity

“I thought about the famous line from indigenous Australian writer and activist Lilla Watson, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
― D.L. Mayfield, The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power

“Asking people to do good, to give, to be charitable, becomes easy in these kinds of societies; asking them to be neighbors with those they most wish to help is not, since it points out an inconvenient truth that most of us try hard to forget all the time: some of us have worked hard to make sure we are only neighbors with certain kinds of people, and now we have to live with the results.”
― D.L. Mayfield, The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power

“William Cavanaugh believes that desire in a consumeristic society keeps us distracted from the desires of those who are truly hungry.8 It numbs us not only by encouraging us to want more and more but also by negating our God-given desire to work toward the common good. Consumeristic societies, like the one I live in, only exist by making the individual supreme. Everywhere we look there are people who are seen by God in an empire that despises and devalues them, even as it exploits them for profit. Learning not just to see but to learn from them is the only cure I know for finding our way out of the never-ending maze of the American Dream.”
― D.L. Mayfield, The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power

“Jesus knew what it meant to never be at home in your own place.”
― D.L. Mayfield, Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith