This Sunday’s readings: James 2:5-17
Reflections
Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them.
~ Dietrich Bonhöffer
The woman says to herself and to anyone who will listen, “I thank you God that you didn’t make me and my husband Claude black. But if the choice was between making me black and making me white trash, God, I would rather you make me black. I couldn’t bear to be white trash.”
The book struck her directly, over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling. The girl’s fingers sank like clamps around the soft flesh of her neck. (The Girl is ‘Mary Grace’)
~ Flannery O’Connor, Revelation
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the ‘rat race’ — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
~ David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008, American author and professor
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
~ Elie Wiesel, 1928-2016, Romanian-American Writer and Professor
Justice is for those who deserve it; mercy is for those who don’t.
~ Woodrow Kroll, 1944- , Preacher/Radio Host
Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
~ Terry Pratchett, 1948-2016, I Shall Wear Midnight
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1821-1881, Russian Novelist