The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.

Those who came to the United States didn't realize they were white until they got here. They were told they were white. They had to learn they were white. An Irish peasant coming from British imperial abuse in Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s, arrives in the United States. You ask him or her what they are. They say, "I am Irish." No, you're white. "What do you mean, I am white?" And they point me out. "Oh, I see what you mean. This is a strange land."

Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.

Theology is indispensable for religious communities to make sense of themselves and their changing views about the world in light of what is perceived to be revelation, but, at the same time, that theology can have a pretentiousness, or double pretentiousness, if it is acontextual as opposed to contextual, if it is foundationalist as opposed to antifoundationalist, or ahistorical as opposed to historicist.

We don't hear our president [Barack Obama] talking about the need for high-quality jobs for everybody, giving it priority, not just giving a speech in Detroit. That's fine, but speaking to Tim Geithner, speaking to Larry Summers. When are you going to make jobs, jobs, jobs a priority rather than Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street a priority? That's what I'm concerned about.