The priest Amaziah said of the prophet Amos, ‘The land is not able to bear all his words. My zeal has consumed me, because mine enemies have forgotten thy words.’
Holy Saturday Matins on Friday Evening of Passion Week
Peace, peace, they say, when there is no peace.
Prophet Jeremiah
I am reading Princeton professor Cornwell West’s new book ‘Democracy Matters’ and he takes American Imperialism, and the evangelical right wing which is affiliated with it, [as a] Christianity which has sold out the prophetic element that stands for the poor and dispossessed, and has allied itself with the very forces of the Beast [called ‘worldliness in the New Testament] whose symbols are power, possession, privilege—the very elements that killed Christ because he had passion.
Letter from my friend Stephen Muse
I hate, I despise, your feast days.. I don’t want your burnt offerings.. Take away from me the noise of your songs.. But let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Amos, 5, 21—24.
We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant.. struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Genuine heroism for mankind is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem. The ideal critique of a faith must always be whether it embodies within itself the fundamental contradictions of the human paradox and yet is able to support them without fanaticism, sadism and narcissism, but with openness and trust.
Ernest Becker