Rose Olsen

“I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if  Jesus said "I was hungry and you fed me," then Christ's presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Christ's presence is in the hungry being fed. Christ comes not in the form of those who visit the imprisoned but in the imprisoned being cared for. And to be clear, Christ does not come to us as the poor and hungry. Because, as anyone for whom the poor are not an abstraction but actual flesh-and-blood people knows, the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. And those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. We all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other. No, Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry, needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of  God might be known. ... No one gets to play Jesus. But we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others' needs and have our own needs met.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!