Daniel Berrigan's Pursuit of a Just Society
"While all empires rise and fall, Berrigan said, it is the religious and moral values, and the nonhistorical values, of compassion, simplicity, love, and justice that endure and alone demand fealty. The current decline of American power is part of the cycle of human civilizations, although, he said ruefully, 'the tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others. We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.'
"Berrigan argued that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance."
— The Death of the Liberal Class
Extremism
"The radical left and the radical right, each made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war. Their marginalized lives, battered by economic misery, have been filled with meaning. They hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed. They claim the right to use force to silence those defined as the enemy. They sanctify anger. They are consumed by the adrenaline-driven urge for confrontation. These groups are separated, as Sigmund Freud wrote of those who engage in fratricide, by the 'narcissism of minor differences.' "
— America: The Farewell Tour
The Function of the Liberal Class
"In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite."
— The Death of the Liberal Class
Great Writing
"Great writing serves as a steady reminder that, among mutable and inconstant human beings, these remain glimpses of redemption, understanding, and compassion — even if these virtues rarely triumph."
— Cited in Who Reads Poetry, edited by Fred Sasaki and Don Share
Imagination as a Source of Alternative Vision
"It is through imagination that we can recover reverence and kinship. It is through imagination that we can see ourselves in our neighbors and the other living organisms of the earth. It is through imagination that we can envision other ways to form a society. The triumph of modern utilitarianism, implanted by violence, crushed the primacy of the human imagination. It enslaved us to the cult of the self."
— Cited in Disposable Futures, by Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux
The Lethal Addiction of War
"The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for years. It is peddled by mythmakers-historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state — all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us."
— War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
The Quality that War Shares with Love
"We believe in the nobility and self-sacrifice demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover in the communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. I do not miss war, but I miss what it brought. I can never say I was happy in the midst of the fighting in El Slavador, or Bosnia, or Kosovo, but I had a sense of purpose, of calling. And this is the quality war shares with love, for we are, in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security."
— War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Rebellion as Soul Nourishment
"Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetrate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others."
— Cited in Occupy Spirituality, by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
The Sabbath
"I see now that we never celebrated the Sabbath. The Sabbath is about honoring those we love and those who love us, honoring the essence of the divine. By turning away from work, from the world, to cherish those we love, we honor the Sabbath. The Sabbath is not about one day. It is about taking time for a daughter's basketball game, a son's track race, a dinner where a family talks. The Sabbath is the time set aside to nurture all that gives us meaning in life, all that makes life worth living. The Sabbath is the recognition that work, that all the hours we spend making a living, are in fact the means to this end, to the ability to have and sustain love. When we ignore the Sabbath we destroy that which we should be working to achieve."
— Losing Moses on the Freeway
The Ten Commandments
"The commandments guide us toward relationships built on trust rather than fear. Only through trust can there be love. Those who ignore the commandments diminish the possibility of love, the single force that keeps us connected, whole and saved from our physical and psychological torment. A life where the commandments are routinely dishonored becomes a life of solitude, anger, and remorse ..."
— Losing Moses on the Freeway
