People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities.
The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.
I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.
You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.
No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to “spiritual” subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history’s most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.
An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
The language that reveals also obscures.
Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world’s beauty and abundance.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.
A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.