The logic of the Social Gospel presumed that a clear-eyed and courageous group of Christians could use rational suasion and moral authority to awaken the nation’s social conscience.
“Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it — I always wanted one when I was a boy.”
“I understand,” she said after a minute. “When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can’t you?”
He nodded.
“Yes. Otherwise it’s all just mañana — waiting for the morning or the moon.”
― The Love of the Last Tycoon
“I understand,” she said after a minute. “When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can’t you?”
He nodded.
“Yes. Otherwise it’s all just mañana — waiting for the morning or the moon.”
― The Love of the Last Tycoon
“Whether theologians acknowledge it or not, all theologies begin with experience ... We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it. For when we mistake our own talk about God with ultimate reality, we turn it into ideology.”
― Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian
― Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian
“Who needs money anyhow? Leastwise, not right aways we don't ... except for dopes. We ought to save enough so we can have a dope every day cause my brains get fried if I can't have myself an ice-cold dope. And cigarettes. I surely do appreciate a smoke. Dopes and smokes and Henry are the only things I love." "You like me some, don't you?" he said, without meaning really to speak aloud. In any case, Idabel ... did not answer.”
― Other Voices, Other Rooms
― Other Voices, Other Rooms
“Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born dead, literally: the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she?”
― Other Voices, Other Rooms
― Other Voices, Other Rooms
“Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a nonoffensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America's cross.”
― Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian
― Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian
Matt’s 2025 Year in Books
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