Sublime

despite the towering effect that institutions have on us, they have to be seen for what they truly are: mere products of human activity. As human constructs, institutions cannot adequately reflect back to us our own intrinsic worth. Jesus’s own rejection by the religious and political establishment of his day bears witness to the tendency of instit

Before Moses, the public authority had been a mere instrument of the city, a body established by the city’s duly constituted, elected officials to carry out one of their decisions. His public authorities had been set up to do what they wanted done. Now his authorities would do what he wanted done.

The key to the theological affirmation here is not only the verbal assent to the power of God to grant identity and liberation to an oppressed and humiliated people. Equally important is the verbal passion with which these affirmations are asserted and the physical responses they elicit from the community in which the testimony is given. Some will

The great problem with dominant white theologians, especially white men, is their tendency to speak as if they and they alone can set the rules for thinking about God. That is why they seldom turn to the cultures of the poor, especially people of color, for resources to discourse about God. But I contend that the God of Jesus is primarily found whe

people is to relate the story of our mothers’ and fathers’ struggles to our present struggles and thereby create a humane future for our children. We must take the speeches and tales, the blues and the spirituals, the prayers and the sermons of black people and incorporate them into our present existence, relating our parents’ strivings to our dail

If equality of educational opportunity can be established, democracy will be real and justified. For this is the vital truth beneath its catchwords: that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. The rights of man are not rights to office and power, but the rights of entry into every avenue

arrangements create what the postwar sociologist C. Wright Mills called “structural immorality” and what the political scientist Jamila Michener more recently labeled exploitation “on a societal level.”[27]

In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference of interests” between “the rich and poor”—“those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings”—and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would com