It takes unbelievable spiritual courage, moral fortitude, to engage in militant nonviolence.

When we think of globalization we are thinking in part of structures and institutions that have been developed over time and that have allowed us to become more interdependent and interrelated. But the development, the extraordinary development, of those structures and institutions has not fundamentally transformed our humanity. We are still those animals with fears and anxieties and insecurities in the face of death and dread and disappointment and disease.

To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies.

Anybody who takes Martin Luther King seriously has got to go beyond the standard understanding of who he was, has to connect those dots.

It's clear that he was incredibly courageous in his critique of white supremacy, wealth inequality, and imperial power as it relates to war in particular. But it's easy to deodorize Martin King, to sanitize or sterilize him. And I simply want to reveal his radical love and his radical analysis as what they really were.

As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.

There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There's a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas.