Sublime

[www.runawaycircus.org]

Robert Bellah signaled this shift in the 1980s with the book Habits of the Heart. In it, his team described the shift away from identities formed in relation with local people and places, and toward a greater individualism that turned away from others across the street, a few doors down, or up a flight of stairs.10

“As a Christian, my hope and trust are centered on Jesus Christ . . . [who] is for us God made man, and made a part of the history of humanity. Precisely for this reason, Christian hope for the world and its future extends to every human person. Because of the radiant humanity of Christ, nothing genuinely human fails to touch the hearts of Christia

as the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper would explain in a New York church immediately following the Civil War, justice was not fulfilled if anyone was unequal before the law. “We are all bound together,” she said, “in one great bundle of humanity.” Our fates are tied up with each other’s, she understood, and the sooner people realize that, the be

A Tale of Two Americas

“Any gospel that does not…speak to the issue of enslavement” and “injustice” and “inequality—any gospel that does not want to go where people are hungry and poverty-stricken and set them free in the name of Jesus Christ—is not the gospel.”

Father George Hurley, for example, eschewed programmatic solutions for the urban black poor, urging his followers to counter racism with prayer and positive thinking.