“When we grow accustomed to neglecting beauty, we eventually become creatures of hatred. We lose? our imagination—a virtue to which wonder is helplessly tied.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Dimostriamo loro che non sono così infallibili, deludiamo la loro aspettativa di un altro martire da aggiungere alla lista già così zeppa, non ascolti la lusinga: un Carlo o una Joyce non avranno che un piccolo nome su una lapide. […] I morti hanno torto se dopo la loro morte non c'è qualcuno che li difenda.”
Source: L'arte della gioia
“Why speak with assumption,
Why speak with theories,
When we could analyze
the actual person?
Prejudice is not only be immoral, but also illogical”
Source: For the Intellect
“If your sense of justice and freedom starts and ends with instagram, you are not an activist, you are just a circus act.”
Source: Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion
“We are a people much more concerned with ruling than loving. This is a mistake that positions us in places where we are no longer close enough to another person or thing to perceive its pain or need. To be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us. To protect everything may seem like too great a call. But we will not survive without it. Everything should be called by its name.
So let justice roll down and twist and juke like a movement.
Let it march into your bones, into seas of charred cane. Wash the earth in justice and watch what rises to the surface. Curses can't breathe underwater.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“People who truly know how to wonder don't expend a great deal of energy talking about it; they are off catching snowflakes on hot tongues. They're folding themselves in half to smell the sweet potatoes in the oven just one more time. I no longer try to convince someone of the delight of soup dumplings; I take them to Dim Sum Garden on Race Street in Philly and let them watch me slurp. I let the steaming miracle broth run down my face and lap it up in remembrance.
I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“For me, the story of God becoming body is only matched by God's submission to the body of a woman. That the creator of the cosmos would choose to rely on an embodied creation.
To be grown, fed, delivered—God put faith in a body. In Mary's muscles and hormones, bowels and breasts. And when Christ's body is broken and blood shed, we should hold in mystery that first a woman's body was broken, her blood shed, in order to deliver the hope of the world into the world.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“White anger is something else. It can spit on a kid and appear victim enough to have someone else thrown off the bus. White rage, like all rage born not in defense of dignity but in defense of oppressive power, is manipulative. It is one of many examples of the difference between anger that dominates and anger that liberates […] Anger that dominates relies on fear tactics and abuse to live. It makes no demand of the world except that it bow. This is often because it fears being ruled or overpowered itself. This is no excuse. Holy anger is that which liberates. It marches, chants, and flips tables, demanding wrong be called by its rightful name. It is both passion and calculation, longing for more but for the sake of justice and dignity.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“The children will sit first, because they are unafraid. And the elders will follow, because they are unafraid of their fear.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. And our lament as deep as our hope.
Now there is a distinction to be made between true lament and the more sinister form of sadness we know as despair. Despair is lament emptied of hope. It is a shell that invites the whole of your soul to dwell in its void. Many of us will visit this shell, but despair depends upon our staying. With no framework for healthy lament, I was a prisoner to sadness.
Even still, it's not good to drag someone from their lament out of fear of despair. In fact, being forced too quickly out of lament can drag the soul into despair in secret. We are left to wander in sadness but without a confidant to help guide us out of the void.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us