Our world has expanded but our vision has not. For us in the U.S., our parochialism betrays us. Most of us have never been out of the United States of America. We are still only beginning to get accustomed to the differences right in our midst, let alone in the wider world around us. We are still getting accustomed to the integration of Protestants and Catholics, of black and white, of male and female. And even those tentative associations are full of uncertainty, of tension. Even here, we are yet strangers to one another.

The rest of the world is at best a blur or a fantasy to Americans. We can't imagine why they aren't like us. We can't conceive why they just don't work harder so they can have what we have. We can't see why their governments aren't democracies. We wonder why they hate us. But we have not seen abject poverty. We have not lived with the draught and famine that industrialism in other parts of the world can cause. We do not know what it must be like to find death more desirable than life. We do not understand desperation. What's worse, we have been brought up on playground politics: If they hit you, you hit them back. Or even more terrible, hit them before they hit you.

Joan Chittister, Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of Peace by John Dear