"I went back to church thinking that it would be like an epidural, like it would take the pain away… that church would make the pain go away. Faith and church was not an epidural for me at all; it was like a midwife who just stood next to me saying, 'Push. It’s supposed to hurt a little bit.'"...

"Hopelessness is the enemy of justice." —Bryan Stevenson, in his 2017 Ware Lecture...

"We live in an occupied country, misunderstood; justice will take us millions of intricate moves." from Stafford's poem "Thinking for Berky," in Traveling through the Dark...

We’re the faith of reason and science and dignity. There's nothing wrong with that. It’s just that too many of us have been taught by culture that what "smart" looks like is white, male, and middle class. We’ve been taught that credibility and authority are white. We’ve been taught that what...

"My dear friends, please try to understand that whiteness is limitless possibility. It is universal and invisible. That’s why many of you are offended by any reference to race. You believe you are acting and thinking neutrally, objectively, without preference for one group or the next, including...

We don't live into our redemption very much, or get to win the fight over death. Jesus’ resurrection is a symbol and a promise that we are redeemed and that death’s dominion is not the final word. On Easter the Deep Magic breaks through. We proclaim and sing that love’s redeeming work is done...

Hope is not just a good idea Love is not naïve Faith is not just the brave face we put on a hopeless situation...

There are two questions that [a person] must ask [themselves]. The first is "Where am I going?" and the second is "Who will go with me?" If you ever get these questions in the wrong order, you are in trouble. source: Fire in the Belly by Sam Keen, p. 12.

What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves... by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute... [W]e can, to a certain extent, change the world; we...

"Our universal calling as humans is to be the most loving people we can be."...

“Any religion that puts hate speech in the mouth of God is no religion at all.”...

"Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance."...

"Marriage isn’t meant to make you happy; marriage is there so that it gives you a life in which you find happiness."...

"The power of transgression is the archetypal foundational story of the Bible because we transgress; because we want to break our own codes, sometimes of morality, sometimes of ethics, sometimes of the power structures… because there is freedom in transgression, and there is power in...

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." This quote, attributed to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is likely a paraphrase of original language that was slightly different. The closest statement your WorshipWeb Curator could find is this excerpt from Rev. King's...

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain... By trying to handle all suffering through willpower, denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious: we do not handle suffering; suffering handles us in deep and mysterious ways that ironically...

What makes us human beings so uniquely wonderful in this puzzling universe is that we never give up on love. Against all odds, with no guarantee of being loved in return, out of the hate and hurt so often handed us, in the face of the sad suffering history has let us see, we go on loving....

The invisibility of whiteness means that one doesn't have to notice that one is white. So there are people, and then there are black people. There are people and there are Latino people. And people—just people, just folks—turn out to be white, but we don't notice it. White people have the luxury...

"The thing that's really slick about whiteness, if you will, is that most of the benefits can be obtained without ever doing anything personally......

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." This quote has been widely attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There is no question for which compassion is not the answer."...

وطن المرء ليس مكان ولادته و لكنه المكان الذي تنتهي فيه كل محاولاته للهروب "Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease."...

"Desire is owning the wanting."...

"The purpose of the church is to heal the consequences of lovelessness and injustice in the hearts and souls of our members so they might heal the community and together heal the world."...

"We hold on to hell because when we discard it we glimpse through the clearing smoke a God who is too complicated for us."...

“God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist..."

"Our children did not get their wounds alone. They were created by the actions of our family, our communities and our world. They were created by the things we choose to believe in, the causes we chose to champion and the despair we chose to neglect....

"There is a hope that's been expressed in you: the hope of seven generations, maybe more. And this is the faith that they invest in you: It's that you'll do one better than was done before. Inside you know, inside you understand; inside you know what's yours to finally set right..." —lyrics from...

"Our first task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy. Else we may find ourselves treading on [people's] dreams. More seriously still, we may forget that God was here before our arrival."...

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.

Unconditional love is not so much about how we receive and endure each other, as it is about the deep vow to never, under any condition, stop bringing the flawed truth of who we are to each other.

Please note: written in 1969, Berry's reflection on the "wound" of racism was written before inclusive gender was used. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself....

"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”...

“Hope has to be seen to be believed. It has to be made visible. It has to be something we can feel and touch. We are called to be persons who embody hope for one another. We have to be each other’s partners in hope.”...

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you help another human being.

I have learned to trust those who are witnesses rather than gurus, those who express their confusion as well as their knowledge, and those who share their suffering along with their joy.

The sacred is present and available to us ­wherever we look or are willing to find it. If we remain open and expectant—watching out of the corners of our eyes, keeping our ears cocked, putting away all preconceived ideas—our lives will emanate the sacred.

Oh, the comfort—the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—having neither to weigh thoughts nor mea­sure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then...

Our task is to be who we are, in every way we can be; our salvation proceeding in putting ­ourselves back together after each tumble...We irridesce, shine, and radiate. We exclaim and roar: we are.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

Wisdom, fundamentally, is knowing who you are, where you are, and what you’re trying to do or be.

Love is knotted and gnarled, like an old tree fighting with the wind, like branches too brittle for their own good, like roots that relentlessly inform how deeply we can trust and how freely we can forgive.

“I believe that if, on every Sunday morning before going to church, we could be lifted to a mountain-peak and see a horizon line of six hundred miles enfolding the copious splendor of the light on such a varied expanse; or if we could look upon a square mile of flowers representing all the specie...

Life does not call us merely to do over and over again what we have already done; nor does it call us to act out, as puppets, parts already assigned to us. No. In the midst of a situation which is itself ever changing, we are free to bring into realization new relationships of understanding and...

To repent means to turn in a new direction—not just to admit what we have done wrong, but to resolve to be a better person.

Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.

Look well to the growing edge! All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms,...