For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice.

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.

Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

You don't begin by dehumanizing those who are dehumanizing you, because it contributes to the cycle of dehumanization in the world.

I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts.

To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.

Justice is what love looks like in public.