Joey Dye

“I realized that it was precisely because of America’s glaring imperfections that I should seek to participate in its progress, carve a place in its promise, and play a role in its possibility. And at its heart and at its best, America was about pluralism.”
― Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation

“Home. The place where your barber doesn’t have to ask what to do with your hair. Where the music you love came of age. Where the leading citizens fill you with pride. Where your best friend’s dreams are coming true. Where your former students recognize you on the street. The piece of earth that your hands have helped shape.”
― Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation

“My confusion about the separation between the servant class and the upper middle class revealed a quintessentially American point of view. Status is much more fluid in America, at least within the wide range of the population that can loosely be characterized as middle-class. I wait tables at a restaurant, and after my shift is over, I go out to a lounge and someone waits on me. Even if I get a graduate degree and earn a six-figure salary, I don’t treat waiters like a permanently lower class. After all, I was one and know what it feels like. And who knows when someone serving me in this restaurant will get their own graduate degree and be my boss. Better to be friendly. My “American-ness” was starting to stare me in the face in India: not the America of big-screen televisions and Hummers, but the America that, despite its constant failings, managed to inculcate in its citizens a set of humanizing values—the dignity of labor, the fundamental equality of human beings, mobility based on drive and talent, the opportunity to create and contribute.”
― Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation

“If one believes that God is up there in heaven, separate from the world, and is preparing a reward for you in the next life, the belief can have the result of making people accept their fate, however hard and unjust, and be less willing to change it. But for us, who find illumination in the mortal world, the situation is this: Where poverty, oppression, or pollution has taken root, and made the world less fit for the flourishing of life, there we find work to do.”
― Brendan Myers, The Other Side of Virtue: Where Our Virtues Come From, What They Really Mean, and Where They Might Be Taking Us