Mary Hunter Maxwell

“Why do I say we’re in the gutter? Perhaps I should speak for myself. I am a Westerner, and I benefit from a global system of trade that keeps the majority of the world’s population in poverty. I am an educated white resident of one the world’s leading economic giants, and I benefit from a social system that privileges me and my dependents in almost every conceivable way, at the expense of other cultural and ethnic groups. Until recently I was living in a country that props up numerous tyrants abroad and whose militarism costs the lives of civilians around the world every day. I am a man, and participate in a gender system that has perennially denied women full flourishing and, in most cases, still does. I am a twenty-first century citizen of the developed world, and I take for granted that my country and my generation gets to consume up the vast majority of the world’s non-renewable resources even though it is other countries and other generations that will likely bear the consequences; and I cannot imagine things any other way.5”
― Samuel Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God