Really living like Christ will not mean reward, social recognition, and an assured income, but difficulties, discrimination, solitude, anxiety. Here, too, the basic experience of the cross applies: the wider we open our hearts to others, the more audibly we intervene against the injustice that rules over us, the more difficult our lives in the rich unjust society will become.

To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names.

This is the purpose of theology. By it my life becomes clearer and more conscious.

Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing, or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition.

Religion does not confirm that there are hungry people in the world; it interprets the hungry to be our brethren whom we allow to starve.

toleration of exploitation, oppression, and injustice points to a condition lying like a pall over the whole of society; it is apathy, an unconcern that is incapable of suffering.

A competitive society is a society of envy.