Peta Hay

“Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.”
― Richard Rohr, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“When you are being judged by someone that has no idea who you are always remember this: Dogs always bark at strangers and usually there is always some wacko neighbor that wants to try out their new gun on an intruder.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The Christian lives by grace as Abba’s child, utterly rejecting the God who catches people by surprise in a moment of weakness—the God incapable of smiling at our awkward mistakes, the God who does not accept a seat at our human festivities, the God who says “You will pay for that,” the God incapable of understanding that children will always get dirty and be forgetful, the God always snooping around after sinners. At the same time, the child of the Father rejects the pastel-colored patsy God who promises never to rain on our parade.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

“Faulkner first spoke about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the hypocrisy of boasting of our values to our enemies “after we have taught them (as we are now doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even not the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours.” He went on to say that if Americans are to survive, we will have to show the world that we are not racists, “to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front.” Yet this might be a test we will fail: “Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive.” And his damning conclusion: “Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”
― Paul Theroux, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads