EthixBytes

(A Collection of Quotes, Comments, Statistics, and News Items)

“On September 11 we lost, and lost forever, our sense of invulnerability and invincibility. Hard as that may be, let us not grieve their passing: they were illusions.”
William Sloan Coffin in the N.Y. Times [the activist minister who inspired ‘Rev. Sloan’ in Doonesbury].

“For black people, terrorism in this country began long before Sept. 11, 2001."
Retired Black Minister Jesse Truvillion.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise high with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, December 1, 1862.

“We who allow ourselves to become engaged in war, need this testimony of the absolutist [pacifism] against us lest we accept the warfare of the world as normative, lest we become callous to the horror of war, and lest we forget the ambiguity of our own actions and motives and the risk we run of achieving no permanent good from the momentary anarchy in which we are involved.”
Reinhold Niebuhr in a 1940 essay.

“Pagan converts to the early church did not absorb Christian teaching intellectually and then decide to become Christians. They were attracted to what they saw of the faith and practices of the early Christian communities."
George Lindbeck in The Christian Century.

“In the new code of laws . . . I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them. . . . Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.”
Abigal Adams in David McCullough’s biography John Adams.

“Seventy-nine percent of Muslims in this country say that U.S. foreign policy led to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and 67 percent say that changing policy in the Middle East is the best way to wage war against terrorism, according to a poll released December 19 in Washington."
The Christian Century

“The war against terrorism is a brilliant construct. It may not have been started by George W. Bush, but it certainly works to his advantage. . . . What makes this war so superior, in political terms, is its vagueness. Since the terrorist, by definition, can be anyone—the man in the next apartment, the person lurking on the subway platform—we can never be sure who the enemy is. More important, we can never know when we’ve won. As a result, this war has the capacity to go on forever. It will be called off only when those in charge choose to do so. And why would they?"
Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom.

“It might sound absolutely insane coming from me, but what the world needs is a good shot of morality."
Reformed shock-rocker Alice Cooper

“There are at least as many sheep outside the fold as there are wolves within.”
Augustine

“The state must not claim the right to take human life away, which belongs only to the Almighty.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin in a speech opposing the restoration of executions in Russia.

“A leader is a fellow who refuses to be crazy the way everybody else is crazy and tries to be crazy in his own crazy way.”
Peter Maurin in The Catholic Worker

“The church now finds itself increasingly two steps removed from persons shaped by the contemporary culture. The church no longer shares a common language with these persons, and it finds itself living with forms that for the most part have either been marginalized or privatized in meaning.”
Craig Van Gelder in Missiology

“As of June 30, 2000, the population of federal, state, and local prisons or jails was 1,931,859, a three percent increase over 1999. The U.S. has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, but only five percent of the world’s population.”
National Prison Project

“The problems the [Enron] scandal reveals are systemic. The individuals involved may have been uniquely greedy and unethical, but they were empowered by a system that exalted greed as it diminished ethics and accountability.”
Marjorie Kelley, publisher of Business Ethics magazine.

“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. . . . Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.”
Francois Fenelon

Updated Wednesday, April 17, 2002