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"Put constructively, signs of the kingdom of the God met in Christ can be found in various wonders, varieties, quandaries, and mysteries across creation and in all cultures. Put negatively, the Christian who closes himself off to these signs and works of God beyond the public that is the church make God smaller than the church, and so makes an idol of the church. And idolatry is a betrayal of baptism."

"Since God and Christ are always greater than any of our readings, Christians constantly stand to learn and be enriched by texts outside the church's sacred library, by publics other than the church."

"In the story usually referred to as the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus made it clear that neighbors are quite simply the persons at hand—including our enemies. They are the people we happen to live with and alongside. They are the people in need whom we might help. Their welfare is our concern."

"Compared to serious citizenship, flag-waving is easy. It can be a way of pretending to costly loyalty without making any commitment more strenuous than house decoration."

"We tell ourselves war decisively and effectively brings peace, and ignore the reality that war often begets more war."

"With a bias toward believing violence to be outstandingly effective, we fail to look at our wars not only closely but in terms of the longer view. Thus we speak of the Civil War as 'settling' the issue of slavery, as if slavery had and has not ongoing effects, as if the brutalizing and hateful mind-sets birthed and steeped in American slavery did not continue to manifest themselves after 1865."

"If this is so, what occurs when the Christian who also happens to be an American revisits our nation's deep attraction to violence? Put directly, what might the church now have to say in response to the American myths of violence as redemptive and regenerative, a force that cleanses and brings new life?"

"For the first three centuries of its life, before it was sanctioned by Roman imperial power, the Christian church embodied a presumption for peace and against violence. Across much of their subsequent history, Christians have undeniably and frequently availed themselves of coercion and violence. Yet the biblical witness of Christ and his cross always sat uneasily with the employment of violence."

"Inside American adults are little boys and girls clad in coonskin caps, mesmerized by the allure of idealized violence."

"Scapegoating allows the many to pretend that forces tearing us apart are not among us. It turns scrutiny outward, most easily and alluringly onto one or more minorities."

"American innocence, with its plenitude of dangerous and infantilizing effects, can be maintained only by forgetting American history from its very inception. There was no golden age of absolute innocence; slavery and racism cannot be recognized as minor (and so now negligible) subplots in the American story."

"The problem is not that the myth of progress lacks any truth; it is that progress is not the whole truth. The uncritical embrace of progress hides or erases the actual past. And starting from an illusory past means we can only move into an illusory future. Nostalgia is not so much the honoring of living tradition, which is dynamic, as it is a mockery and caricature of tradition."

In point of fact, however, Americans have never actually been as sheerly individualistic as the national mythology has it. It is significant that the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock arrived on these shores as a community of families, intending to found a new 'commonwealth.' They never meant to go it alone as self-made men and women."

"We want to be self-sufficient, yet loved and loving. We each want to do everything on our own terms, and yet simultaneously belong to a community. We desire our self-interested freedom from others above all things, and at the same time we want never to be lonely."

"And so we encounter the great American contradiction. As never before in our history, we prize individualistic liberty above all other goods, but we refuse to recognize that favoring this good so extremely may inhibit or even eliminate realization of other goods."

"Where one's highest and most comprehensive allegiance lies—there is on'es real worship."

"When the prophet Amos prayed, 'Let justice roll down like waters' (Amos 5:24), he was not merely hoping for a flood in his prayer closet."