morepraxis

?We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that this enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord?s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never [...]

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be [...]

To me, practicing mindfulness in the act of consuming is the basic act of social justice.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Interview by Catherine Ingram, In the Footsteps of Ghandi.

We have all known persons who have lost everything and have not lost the joy of living; persons who are imprisoned unjustly and do not lose their peace and tranquility; persons who live in misery and take in orphans; persons who have suffered injustices and seek to reestablish justice with no desire to revenge.
- Segundo [...]

But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
 
- Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776.

?The pursuit of justice must therefore be a primary obligation of the people of God. It is so critical, say the biblical prophets, that without a commitment to justice, all other means of worshipping God, even those commanded by Gods law, are bankrupt. In the absence of Justice, Amos declares, religious performances to merely nauseate [...]

Give us, O God,
leaders whose hearts are large enough
to match the breadth of our own souls
and give us souls strong enough
to follow leaders of vision and wisdom.
In seeking a leader, let us seek
more than development for ourselves?
though development we hope for?
more than security for our own land?
though security we need?
more than satisfaction for our wants?
though [...]

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club [...]