“The job of the peacemaker is to stop war, to purify the world, to get it saved from poverty and riches, to heal the sick, to comfort the sad, to wake up those who have not yet found God, to create joy and beauty wherever you go, and to find God in everything and in everyone.”
- Muriel Lester
“Whether terrorism occurs in Manhattan, Madrid, London, Riyadh, or La Paz, it is essential that we understand that in the long-term these horrible acts will not be stopped by the military or by security guards in airports and along our borders. They will only be stopped when enough of us demand that our corporations, banks, and governments cease to exploit the majority of the world’s population and resources and when we insist on dealing with the world from a place of compassion.”
-John Perkins from “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”
“No truth worth knowing can ever be taught; it can only be lived.”
- C.F. Andrews
“Air Force Magazine’s advertisements for new weapons…rival Playboy as a catalog of men’s sexual anxieties and fantasies.”
- Carol Cohn
“When the Christian church and the Christian world did not do anything effective about peacemaking, God found a prophet of nonviolence in Mahatma Gandhi…In our days Gandhi has shown this (no hope in retaliation) to a great part of the world, and I wish that Christians would not be the last group of men and women to learn the lesson that God is teaching us through this prophet.”
- Martin Niemoeller
“I have slowly come to see that what the church needs most desperately is precisely such a clear-cut, unambiguous position. Governments will wrestle with the option of war, and ethicists can perhaps assist them with their decisions but the church’s own witness should be understandable by the smallest child: we oppose violence in all its forms. No abuse or beatings. No rape. No more male supremacy or war. No more degradation of the environment.”
- Walter Wink
“It was in the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit that the disciples realized the greatness of the way that Jesus had lived, that he had shown a new possibility for human history. Even more clearly did they see the cross as pivotal, that it revealed the way God dealt with enemies and how a real human being responds to violence and evil and exerts power. They saw the falseness of power as domination and the soundness of power as living the truth and being ready to suffer for it. They knew that they were to live that way as well. They were to take Jesus’ mission forward into history. That mission is to resists evil in a way that does not cause more evil; to name, unmask and engage sinful social structures just as Jesus did; to practice concrete acts of charity for those in need, as Jesus did, and to build, as Jesus did, alternative communities of equality, nonviolence and charity. Living that way is to experience salvation, to be saved.”
- Terrence Rynne
“The cross does not offer an explanatory model that would make us understand what salvation is… Instead it invites us to participate in a process within which we can actually experience history as salvation.”
- Jon Sobrino
“It was once said, if you want to know your idols, consider what you are willing to kill for.”
- Unknown
“Jesus has been so zealously worshiped, his deity so vehemently affirmed, his halo so brightly illuminated, and his cross so beautifully polished that in the minds of many he no longer exists as a man. By thus glorifying him we more effectively rid ourselves of him than did those who tried to do so by crudely crucifying him.”
- Clarence Jordan
