“If we are white, we sometimes forget the powerful advantages that flow our way.  We think it’s all about us. Of course, individuals do matter – and the choices we make matter. But we would benefit from a more nuanced and more honest reckoning of what sustains us.  One thing we can all do is tell true stories – about the role of grace, luck, family help, public investments, and subsidies in our lives. We can disrupt and debunk the mythology of individual deservedness and white advantage – while celebrating individual choices, sacrifices and gifts” (Chuck Collins in an interview in Sojourner, March 2, 2017).

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“We cannot stand the sight of our dark side, so we repress it, push it under, thinking we have thereby disposed of it. But we have not. We have simply pushed it into a place where it both has us in its grip and automatically projects itself on the person or the nation we do not like; so the tension we will not stand in ourselves is carelessly and irresponsibly cast out to increase the tension and strife and anguish of our world” (Charles B. Hanna in The Face of the Deep).

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“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another …” (John Donne)

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 How