The Lord who judges is the Lord who saves; the Lord who vindicates his oppressed witnesses also comes, in their words and hands, to save their oppressors – who are his as well.

The self is – one might say – what the past is doing now, it is the process in which a particular set of ‘given’ events and processes and options crystallizes now in a new set of particular options, responses and determinations, providing a resource of given past-ness out of which the next decision and action can flow. It is continuity; and so it

To hear the good news of salvation, to be converted, is to turn back to the condemned and rejected, acknowledging that there is hope nowhere else.

racism is not evil because its victims are good, it is evil because its victims are human.

What is at issue is simply the transaction that leads to exclusion, to the severance of any relation of reciprocity.

No amount of the rhetoric of ‘self-transcendence’ can substitute for the recovery of the self, the self as the memory of crucifixion and crucifying: there are no dead selves discarded or buried to be the foundation-stones of new identities, because God is the God who opens our graves and gives back the past.

Jesus is unquestionably within the human story, but he is remembered as one who absorbed and did not transmit deprivation and violence. And that is hopelessly paradoxical.

God is the agency that gives us back our memories, because God is the ‘presence’ to which all reality is present.

Insofar as these phenomena are a celebration of the humanity of the oppressed, a willingness to receive from those we have imagined have nothing to give, they are one of the most hopeful signs in our divided civilization. Insofar as they refuse to take seriously the possible transcendence of the oppressive relationship, they are profoundly