All fundamentalist theologians make the ordinances of creation an essential part of creation and absolutize them. Women belong at home, fulfil their life through motherhood, by caring for their husbands and serving them. The fixed role pattern of one particular economic and family order is transformed into an order willed by God and given by creation. With a methodologically similar logic, slaves were understood as those elected by God to serve the whites.

God has no other hands than ours.

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.

If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.

Every acceptance of suffering is an acceptance of that which exists. The denial of every form of suffering can result in a flight from reality in which contact with reality becomes ever thinner, ever more fragmentary. It is impossible to remove oneself totally from suffering, unless one removes oneself from life itself, no longer enters into relationships, makes oneself invulnerable.

Bible texts are best read with a pair of glasses made out of today's newspaper.

To be content with the world as it is is to be dead.