"I believe in the separation of church and state, but not in the separation of people of faith and institutions of government." (4)

"There is too much that is broken in our world to rest our souls on a theology of waiting." (8)

"For America's faithful majority, the millions of us who are eager to reassert the values of compassion and peace and preservation in public life, we are the leaders we've been waiting for." (15)

(on balance between activism and the rest of life) Bob Edgar's wife on his election to Congress: "I don't care who he is, he still has to take out the garbage." (12)

We need to remember to do both. [Craig Myrbo]

Chapt. 1: The Two Churches: Faith Based on Love – or Faith Grounded in Fear, pp. 17 – 20

"Witnessing poverty carved a deep and lasting impression in my soul, as did this observation: Poor people under the care and ministry of people of faith lived in a reality totally separate, far safer and more fulfilling than those left to struggle with poverty alone." (20)

Faith wasn't transactional; it was never 'Do A, B, and C and after you die you'll get X, Y, and Z.' Faith was about works, and works were about this world. What was right was just plain right, and that's why you did it -- not because you expected a reward or feared a punishment in the next world." (21)

"Middle Church inspires faith through love; the far religious right seeks to instill faith through fear." (22)

"The central message of Jesus' ministry was the imperative to love one's neighbor. Know that, he said, and you understand every other commandment." (23)

"...the questions are whether the call we hear will be grounded in hellfire or hope, in the rewards we expect or the responsibilities we feel, and, most of all, whether our conception of what is right will be based on personal piety or morality-in-community." (26-27)

"...The power of prayer is its force in this world, not another.... My faith is not one of waiting for future rewards. It is a call to act today, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the prisoner with the fierce urgency of now.... It is not enough to ask God to heal the sick; we must provide for their health care. It is not enough to pray for relief of the poor; it is up to us to provide it. It is not enough to pray for our fragile planet; we must take person responsibility for its future. I believe in moral absolutes, none more so than those Paul identified in a letter he wrote in prison: faith, hope, and love. But these are not mere feelings. They are actions. They are ways of life." (29)

Chapt. 2: In the Beginning, God Created the Heavens and the Earth…So Stop Messing Them Up! pp. 31 – 37

"We have dominion over the earth the same way a parent has dominion over a child, as a mandate to protect and nourish, not to consume or exploit." (34)

"If there was ever an issue that could unite people of faith across the political spectrum from left to right to the fast but silent faithful center, the environment is it." (36)

"The critical point is that no matter how you interpret the Bible, there isn't a word -- not a chapter, not a verse, not a solitary clause of a single sentence -- that suggests humanity's job is to nudge Armageddon along by hastening its dire predictions." (37)

"Faith calls on us to use the foresight God gave us to steward the planet and preserve creation, not to cling to an unseeing and unthinking belief that what we consume today will be miraculously replaced tomorrow.... The idea that oil companies can stick a straw in the ground, drink up all the oil in the earth for the sake of profit and never ask what right generations five hundred years hence might have to those resources is breathtakingly arrogant and morally abhorrent." (42)

"Global warming is also about global justice." (47)

"Ironically enough, religious leaders who deny the clear, consistent, and proven conclusions of objective scientists are the same people who routinely decry American society for our moral relativism and our supposed reluctance to recognize absolute truth. Yet when science fails to conform to their political agenda, the truth suddenly seems malleable and the fact that it concerns a religious and moral imperative as urgent as preserving our earth makes the double standard all the more tragic....
     President Bush, too, has treated the truth like clay to be molded to the convenience of corporate interests....
     It was a tragic proclamation to the world that we were so consumed by our own greed that we were unwilling to join the community of nations and do our part to steward this fragile planet." (50-51)

"...those on the far right who oppose action on global warming are the same conservative leaders who are always preaching to us about prudence and responsibility." (54-55)

"Atmospheres and oceans don't recognize borders, and I daresay God doesn't, either." (56)

"We have been to the mountaintop and discovered the glaciers are melting." (61)

Chapt. 3: What Part of “Blessed Are the Peacemakers” Don’t They Understand?” pp. 63 – 67

"So if pastor Kennedy is still curious about why a Christian would oppose the war, Matthew 5:9 would be a pretty good place to start his research" (64)

"... if I had to pick what's most offensive, using the name of Jesus Christ to support the waging of preemptive war that has shed the blood of innocents would have to be near the top of the list." (65)

"There are moments when the real suffering of real human beings, every one of them a reflection of God's image, must trump the larger questions of world politics and bring us together as people of faith. A hungry North Korean needs food; a sick Iraqi child needs medicine. And I cannot imagine Jesus or the prophets of Judaism or Islam or any faith having any question about these things." (67)

"That I would even need to raise the question of whether Jesus was a holy warrior or a preacher of peace tells us that something has gone drastically wrong in America's conversation on faith." (75)

"... literalists, those who tell us that every word of the Bible is to be taken exactly as it was handed down, are the very first to tell us, right out in the open, that Jesus didn't really mean what he said. Pat Robertson, for example, says the commandment to turn the other cheek applies to individual Christians, but not necessarily to governments. But we don't bomb governments; we bomb people." (77)

"What victory could be more important than stopping the killing?" (81)

"Dragging out a futile cause [Vietnam war] would have meant more suffering, more bloodshed, more death than finally admitting what Jack Murtha would say about Iraq almost thirty years later: Enough. There comes a time when the killing has to end." (84)

"And there is a terrible perversity in saying the only way to support the troops is to risk their lives in a cause that was hollow and in a mission that is not working.
     The decision to go to war was wrong, and it is plain for all to see. We cannot confuse stubborness for courage." (84) 

Comment:  Saying that the way  to  support the troops is to send them into this war, is like saying the way  to support your young child is to push her into the street in traffic. [Craig Myrbo]

Chapt. 4: Deny Them Their Victory: Faith in the Age of Terrorism,
pp. 85 – 87

"So we must ask ourselves: Are we simply out for blood and revenge, or are we serious about stopping terrorism? Because if our choice is the latter, then we must stand ready to rejoin the community of nations, bring good news to the poor, and set free the oppressed." (90)

"The war on terror is not a war. It is, or should be, a global law enforcement campaign." (93)

"...treating antiterrorism efforts as a war clouds our thinking and impedes our success." 94)

"...the rhetorical treatment of antiterrorism efforts as a war has resulted in what amounts to a permanent suspension of civil liberties. Wars involve territory. They begin and end. Yet can anyone say when, indeed, if ever, the war on terror will be won? There are no capitals to capture, no hills to overrun. The Bush Administraton has set up a standard by which it and its successors will always be able to justify any use of wartime powers simply by saying terrorists might exist, somewhere, sometime." (94-95)

"There are no weapons strong enough to protect us in a world consumed by despair and fueled by resentment. By all means, our military defense must be strong, but our moral defenses must be stronger." (99)

In an era of instant and global communication, America's image -- our moral power -- is an even more important strategic asset than our military power. Even the most aggressive hawks admit that our military power can only be applied in a limited number of places at a time, whereas our moral power can be felt everywhere, all the time." (102)

"We are exceptional when we make the conscious human choice to behave morally even when that is not easy." (104)

"America is not special because we have the God-given right to declare people's guilt and hold them without trial. We are special because our values tell us never to do so. (107)

"The National Council of Churches has said that the denial[s] of rights that inhere in the worth of human beings before God are not only a crime against humanity. They are a sin against God." (109)

"We must be willing to step out of our national arrogance long enough to ask whether we would tolerate, for a single moment under any circumstances at all, the intelligence services of any country, friend or foe, descending on an American city, kidnapping an American, and whisking him or her off to a secret prison to be tortured....
     When our government behaves in this way, we surrender a weapon more powerful against terroism than all the bombs we could drop: our moral authority." (112-113)

"[Today] the fantasy is of 'limited' nuclear weapons like bunker-buster bombs. Once more, the arguments are familiar: The race for war somehow maintains peace and our moral choices are dictated by how our enemies behave. But there is one especially dangerous and indefensible addition: The undercurrent of the argument that the United States should build more nuclear weapons at the same time we are preaching against them to the rest of the world rests on the not-so-thinly veiled claim that it is permissible, even indispensable, for us to have them because we are better, militarily and morally, than everyone else." (115-116)

"Americans wield even more influence around the world now than we did during the Cold War, and we must make a choice: We can use our power to stand with those who yearn for just a taste of the prosperity and freedom we enjoy, or we can use and manipulate the world's most vulnerable people for our momentary advantage. Surely the moral choice is obvious and the strategic one as well. It does not make American's safer to give hundreds of millions of people around the world reasons to resent us." (124)

"America must not become the modern-day version of the Pharisees whose hypocrisy Jesus constantly condemned." (125)

Chapt. 6: Reconciling Abraham’s Children: Toward Peace in the Middle East, pp. 127 – 129

"The important quesiton is not who did what to whom in the past, but how can we move forward for tomorrow. The parties in the region are so bound to old memories that the only hope for peace is for an outside mediator to help them see their common needs." (131)

"...I find it profoundly offensive and condescending to believe that their purpose on this earth is to be the pawns of Christian prophecy." (134)

"The lives of the Israeli people are at stake, and their leaders have concluded that peace is their best hope. Here in America, all that is at stake is a radical theological ideology." (134)

"[The 'realists'] will say love cannot overcome hatreds this ancient; but if they are too deep to be overcome with love, surely they are also too persistent to be contained with weapons.... perpetual conflict is the least realistic solution of all.... nothing is more realistic than hope." (138-139)

"'...Half the people who are showing up at our food kitchens and homeless shelters are working full-time.'
     "The reason is that our policies punish idleness without rewarding work.
     "The radical right's philosophy, one in which too many moderates unfortunately have unthinkingly joined, is that poverty would go away if only we made it more miserable." (143)

Chapt. 7, pp. 144 - 148

"It now falls to mainstream Americans of both parties and all faiths to restore our society's tradition of concern for the least fortunate and to heed God's call, in whatever form and through whatever tradition we may hear it, to love the poor." (148)

Chapt. 7, pp. 148 - 152

"It's time for us to stop being lukewarm about poverty, and it's equally time for us to stop crowing about our wealth or whining about our troubles." (151)

Chapt. 7, pp. 152 - 157

"Capitalism NRSV must recognize that every person deserves the dignity of a decent wage, affordable health care, and the hope of a secure retirement. This in turn means a living wage, universal health care, and portable pensions." (154-155)

Chapt. 8: A Living Wage: Washington’s Callous Antipathy to the Least of These, pp. 159 – 163

"An individual working full time at the minimum wage will earn  the less-than-grand total of $10,712 in an entire year: less than the cost of family health coverage, which went for $10,800 in 2005, less even than the poverty line for a single parent and a single child." (160)

"What we have not yet done is make the living wage a values issue." (163)

"As long as government practices outright hostility to the poor with the tacit approval of the far religious right, no private efforts, no matter how heroic, will be able to alleviate the misery that remains all too prevalent in our society. And when it comes to balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, I am far less concerned about the approval of the religious right than I am about the apathy of the religious center." (169)

"...whatever one thinks of private schools, it was churches that first led the charge for public education back in the nineteenth century, and we must once more offer a prophetic voice to say public schools need more support, not less." (170)

"Today's tough-on-crime political climate is neither good policy nor an accurate reflection of a religion built on the concept of redemption. ... Politicians are fond of declaring their loyalty to the 'three strikes and you're out' policy, but it seems far more sensible and faithful to me to focus on preventing the first strike." (173)

"The economic fact is that affordable health care pays. The spiritual fact, the more relevant fact, is that some things are more important than money." (174)

"No nation in history has ever been as wealthy as the United States, and many societies far less rich than ours provide outstanding educaiton and universal health care. The United States could reduce defense programs by two-third, invest that $300 billion in education and health care, and still spend more on our military than any other nation on earth. I am not suggesting we should necessarily do this; I use the illustration to point out the indisputable fact that our government's priorities are the product of our choices, and it is time our choices reflected our values. What we lack is not money. It is simply the will to act." (174-175)

Chapt. 9: The Poverty That Kills: Hunger, Injustice, and AIDS: Our Global Moral Crisis, pp. 179 – 180

"The poverty that kills is a massive problem but not a complicated one. It is not the result of complicated social problems; it is poverty in the simplest, textbook sense, the kind that arises solely from lack of money." (182)

"We know -- we absolutely know, with no doubt at all -- that every Millenium Development God is achieveable. These goals are the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, of our day; each of them is that sacred, for I cannot imagine anything being more important to God." (185)

"We have helped to hook some of the world's poorest countries on debt they can never repay. The inequality between the prosperity we enjoy and the wrenching poverty of the global labor force that makes it possible is too crushing, too wide, too immoral to escape our notice.
     It is time for a New Revised Standard Version of international capitalism, and it must begin with the simple proposition that each of God's children deserves love equally." (188)

Chapt. 10: Changing Our Beatitudes: Guideposts for Deep-Water Citizenship, pp. 191 – 201

[Note: Here begins a section on seven new beatitudes.]

"1. Blessed Are the Faithful Risk Takers" (196-201)

"Today, we have more than [past leaders of organized labor] could have ever dreamed yet we are paralyzed by fear, our values seemingly less important than the dread of losing a small portion of our disposable incomes." (197)

"I pray for the day when we will read of a rash of firings at churches enmeshed in controversy because parishioners have been challenged to rise up for the poor and peace and our planet. I wish persecution on no one, but surely that would be better, and closer to God's plan, than the smiling politeness with which too many of our clergy accede to a government whose hostility to the least of these violates everything in which we believe. If clergy see one of their parishioners violating the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount or other aspects of scripture, they generally speak out; when we see a government representing three hundred million of us doing exactly the same thing, we somehow feel obligated to remain silent. One reason is that our seminaries offer exquisite preparation for the nineteenth century." (199)

"But if all we want is to hear what we already think, to have our backs spiritually patted and our tickets spiritually punched, there is another place to go on Saturday and Sunday mornings: our living rooms. We come to church and other places of faith because we seek something more, because we want to be challenged, because we want our minds and our hearts stretched beyond where they already were. And we do all this because the greatest risk of all is to confine our souls to the prison of compromised values and baseless fears. But there is no joy more liberating than being true to ourselves.
     ...Without politics in the pulpit, slavery would never have been abolished, women would never have gotten the vote, and segregation would never have been demolished." (199-200)

"We spend days . . . doing domething that neither Jesus nor his disciples nor any of the holy prophets of the Old Testament ever saw a need to attempt: We vote. We take some of the most pressing moral issues of the day, whether it's a question of public policy or private morality, and subject them to majority rule.
     ...The prophets, like Jesus' disciples, knew something we sometimes forget. Majorities can be wrong." (201)

"...we don't need majorities -- we don't have to wait for majorities -- to make a difference. Before we can build a majority, we must be true to our own beliefs.
     ... Compromising core principles is always bad politics." (202-203)

"Give me a remnant minority courageous enough, and we can change the world." (204)

"3. Blessed Are Those Who Love the Stranger" (204-209)

"My God has enough self-confidence to be less concerned with the language in which people pray than with the fullness with which people love one another." (208)

"...'Christ-like' refers to Jesus' message, not whether one accepts him as the Messiah. Do we actually believe Jesus was so shallow, so insecure, that he would reject -- even smite -- someone whose prayers do not include his name but who fully heeds his call to love the poor and work for peace? I believe Christ is my way to understand God. He is my Messiah!" (208)

"The Golden Rule, however one states it, is all of God's will. The rest -- including the language in which we pray and the tradition in which we believe -- is details." (209)

[referring to the "holy trinity of the far religious right" -- homosexuality, abortion, and stem cell research] "...They're important.... But they are not the whole Bible. They wouldn't even make the executive summary.... In fact, two of these personal piety issues didn't even make it into Scripture at all, and the other one is mentioned only twice. Poverty and peace, you may recall, come up in the Bible more than two thousand times....
     ...if God didn't let these issues get in the way of all those moving and powerful words about love of neighbor, neither should we." (210)

"I believe homosexuals--like heterosexuals--are what God has made them, and especially in this age of divorce and disintegration of families, I pray we can open our hearts and our minds not just to tolerate homosexuals, but to learn from them about the meaning of love." (211)

"All of these personal piety issues are important, but no faithful reading of the Bible can possibly elevate them to the end-all, be-all of religious belief. ...they cannot cut and paste two verses of Leviticus, ingnore the rest of the Bible, and call the result a 'faithful' agenda in American politics. It may be a sincere agenda; it is not a Christian one." (215)

"5. Blessed Are the Faithful Voters" (216-203)

"To identify an agenda as 'Christian' without so much as a nod to peace, poverty, and planet Earth is a shameful exploitation of faith.... My own CliffsNotes version of Jesus' voter guide is borrowed from Gandhi, who identified what he called the 'Seven Deadly Social Sins': wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, science without humanity, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle.
     That last one is my favorite, and it's where truly faithful voting for Middle Church, Middle Synagogue, and Middle Mosque must begin. Just as Jesus had to drive the moneychangers from the temple before God's presence could be felt, we must reform our political system before the voice of faithful Americans will be heard." (218)

"...many Americans have voted their personal pocketbooks but too rarely stopped to vote the pocketbooks of the poor." (221-222)

"If we are to be faithful voters, politicians must be as afraid to cut welfare as they are to raise taxes, as eager to make peace as they are to start wars." (223)

"...a well documented trend: Whether on the right or the left politically, churches that engage in social action and stand firmly on the side of issues they are passionate about are growing. Those that aren't involved--actively and personally involved--in life-changing social action are shrinking.
     ...churches don't have a financial problem. That's the symptom, not the illness. We have a vision problem. People don't give money and time to deficits or bland operating budgets; they donate to visions. Visions have to be clear, powerfu, and unencumbered by the fear of giving offense." (224)

"Don't have the money? Raise it. Lacking in personnel? Find volunteers. Worried about damage to the building? Get over it. Logistical problems? Solve them. (Feel free to mix up these answers. It keeps everyone on their toes). And when all else fails, recall Edgar's Iron Law of Getting Things Done: It's easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission." (226)

"...the Bible's dictates are pretty straightforward. One of them is: 'Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.' There's an antidote to the 'Not Invented Here' syndrome. I call it 'ego disarmament.' The institutions of Middle Church and progressive politics need to stop focusing on pride and purity and start working together to frame issues deeply and engage in them more effectively. (227)

"7. Blessed Are Those with a Sense of Humor and a Sense of Hope" (228-233)

"I believe because hope is one of the greatest moral absolutes, because it is the wondrous gift with which God repays faith, because the alternative is despair. And if hope is the highest commandment, then despair must be the greatest sin." (229)

"...to be an optimist is to care enough to try, to have faith enough to believe that the small actions of our lives, those fleeting moments in which we raise a courageous voice or touch a stranger's heart or cast a faithful ballot will be woven together into a tapestry of meaningful and global and prophetic change. We must weep at our world, but weeping must be a prelude to action. And we cannot act from the comfort of our daily lives. We can act only in the deep waters and the fast currents, where bombs destroy and children go hungry and the air and water are foul, and we can do so only with a sense of hope.
     ...Progress is what's left over when ninety-nine defeats are subtracted from a hundred victories. (230-231)

Do we value our faith enough to reclaim it? Do we believe fervently enough in Christ's message of love--or however we hear God's word--to stand up and say we will no longer allow it to be co-opted in the service of an agenda that runs contrary to our religious teachings? Do we believe the peacemakers are blessed enough to stand up to those who make war in the name of our faith? Do we believe God's creation is sacred enough to say we will not sit by as it is despoiled by those who invoke God's name? Do we believe the poor deserve our love enough that we will not allow those who call themselves ministers of God to heap scorn and misfortune upon the least of these, our brothers and sisters? Do we believe our family values--peace, poverty, and planet Earth--deserve equal billing with the so-called values agenda of the far religous right?
     These are the questions we must ask. And then we must ask ourselves another.
     Are we foolish enough to believe and faithful enough to hope? I hope we are.... (231-232)