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Excerpts from ‘Becoming the Answers to Our Prayers’

by Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

“(Amos 5:21-24). Without justice for the poor, religious activities are little more than annoying noise in the ears of God, and the prayers that used to smell like incense to God become a nauseating stench when there is no flesh bringing those prayers to life”

“Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do.”

“Those who have been trained to trust God for provision are the only people who will ever believe that Jubilee is a good idea. Otherwise, it looks like losing everything you have worked so hard to earn”

I remember that apart time is finally over, and while Nikki is gone for good, I still have a woman in my arms who has suffered greatly and desperately needs to believe once again that she is beautiful. In my arms is a woman who has given me a Skyeatcher’s Cloud Chart, a woman who knows all my secrets, a woman who knows just how messed up my mind is, how many pills I’m on, and yet she allows me to hold her anyway. There’s something honest about all of this, and I cannot imagine any other woman lying in the middle of a frozen soccer field with me – in the middle of a snowstorm even – impossibly hoping to see a single cloud break free of a nimbostratus.
Nikki would not have done this for me, not even on her best day.
So I pull Tiffany closer, kiss the hard spot between her perfectly plucked eyebrows, and after a deep breath, I say, “I think I need you too.”

– Pat Peoples in The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick p. 289

MLK Jr. on Civil Disobedience in “Why We Can’t Wait”

“One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.'” p.93

“An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal … A just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.” p.94

“One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” p.95

“All that’s truly documented from time immemorial is that man continues to kill without needing the meat of his quarry; he lies in order to avoid accountability or, conversely, to seize the reins of accountability to the point where the social contact between the government and the governed is his alone to write; he seeks endlessly to enrich himself  at the expense of the public will, and while he’s at it tries all too frequently to turn his personal morality or religion into everyone else’s legality or religiosity, no quarter to the unbelievers of pariahdom.”
– Robert Ludlum in the introduction of Trevayne