James Wheeler

“The memory of the wrong suffered is also a source of my own non-redemption. As long as it is remembered, the past is not just the past; it remains an aspect of the present. A remembered wound is an experienced wound. Deep wounds from the past can so much pain our present that, as Toni Morrison puts it in Beloved, the future becomes“a matter of keeping the past at bay” (Morrison 1991, 52).22 “All things and all manner of things” cannot be well with me today, if they are not well in my memory of yesterday. Even remaking the whole world and removing all sources of suffering will not bring redemption if it does not stop incursions of the unredeemed past into the redeemed present through the door of memory. Since memories shape present identities, neither I nor the other can be redeemed without the redemption of our remembered past. “To redeem the past… that alone do I call redemption,”
― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

“Mature people engage the complexity of the biblical text as it points us to the presence of God without it becoming God or an idol.”
― Angela N. Parker, If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I?: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority

“Since God did not create out of necessity, God's relationship to creation is not held together through a master-slave relationship in which bondage and necessity are the central features. Instead... the creature's existence is a gift. It is the product of the sovereignty or freedom of God. It is just this freedom that the human being images as the mirror of the very Being, which is the very act, of freedom that brought it forth.”
― J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account

“a handsome young man, with black hair and eyes, and a suspicion of beard and whiskers.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot