QUOTATIONS
“May we think of freedom not as the right to do as we please but as the opportunity to do what is right.” By Peter Marshall
Reclaiming This Nation Starts With Reclaiming Our Attention
“Obsessing over tweets doesn’t count as civic duty. It’s rubbernecking, not awareness building, and it’s making us feel more disconnected than ever before. Reclaiming this nation starts with reclaiming our attention, our daily media practices, our everyday conversations.” By Courtney Martin
The Spirituality of the Ordinary Is Luminous
“Awe is such a quintessentially marvelous quality of living an enchanted life. Awe, like love, is not even an emotion. It is, above all, a way of being in the world.” By Omid Safi
For the Future of Our Nation, Have Coffee with Someone Who Causes You Outrage
“My newfound intention is to sit in coffee shops, classrooms, and church pews with people whose views make me want to shout, then curb my anger and talk to them.” By David Smith
Authoritarian nationalism is best opposed by a democratic alternative.
“No democracy can perpetually survive gross disparities in economic and social conditions. The United States is hurtling faster toward authoritarian nationalism than its European counterparts because it has never established more than a minimum of a social democracy.
In every nation with a social democratic tradition, everyone’s health care is covered, the power of private money in the political system is curtailed, and nearly everyone recognizes that there is such a thing as an intolerable level of economic inequality. In the United States, millions have no health coverage, private money dominates the political system and nothing is done to stem staggering inequalities of income and wealth.
White working-class voters have come to hate the federal government because they believe it does nothing to help them. Authoritarian nationalism at least speaks to their distress. What’s needed is a substantive, democratic alternative.”
By Gary Dorrien in his review of the book ON TYRANNY by Timothy Snyder from June 21, 2017 issue of The Christian Century