Re: Separating parents from children at the border:  “Dealing compassionately with strangers seems to be a minimal requirement for just leadership in the model set forth by God, a theme that carries into the New Testament, where Christ’s followers are taught to view themselves as wanderers on earth, and to treat others with appropriate empathetic mercy. But some Christians aren’t strangers in the world at all. Some are very much at home here, or believe that they are, and that there is no tension between the desire of God and the desire of man. People can believe any number of things, especially given the right incentives. If you had all the power in the world, maybe you would also hear a serpent dipping its smooth body down from some shadowy bough to say: God wants you to do whatever you like with your power, and whatever you do with it is good” (Elizabeth Bruenig, The Washington Post).

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“We live in a moment when millions desperately need a government and a society with a heart. Millions of Americans need health care and living wages and protection xenophobia, homophobia, systemic racism, religious bigotry, immigration resentment and climate destruction. This moment we’re in is about whether a government of the people and by the people will, in fact, serve the people. It is about whether we as a people can reconstruct the heart of our democracy” (William Barber II in Sojourners, March, 2018). 

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“As for me, I choose… to stop posing as the judge of the universe. If it brought any good results I might continue, but to date it has carried me out into the desert and left me there…. I choose another road for myself. I choose to look at people through God, using God as my glasses, colored with his love for them” (Frank Laubach quoted in the Renovare Weekly Digest, May 2. 2018).

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“A little girl on an errand took too long getting back home. ‘Why,’ Mom demanded. The youngster explained she was on her way when she met her friend who was crying because she had broken her doll. ‘Oh,’ said her mother. ‘Then you stopped to help her fix her doll?’ ‘No,’ replied her daughter. I stopped to help her cry.’ The world is filled with little girls with broken dolls, boys with broken trucks, young adults with broken dreams, and moms and dads with broken families. Will we take time to help them cry?” (Chic Broersma in Words of Hope, May, 2018.

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 “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better” (One of the core principles at the Center for Action and Contemplation founded by Richard Rohr).

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“The whole created order has been brought into being by a loving God in order that we might enter into a covenant relationship with God. The creation is intentionally incom- plete in order that we might know the awesome honor of participating with God in its completion. One day it will end. Creation’s potential–and ours–is being brought to a great finale of love. Jesus’ life was all about the passionate reckless abandon of being a co-creator with God” (N. Gordon Cosby  quoted in the Inward/Outward website).