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.

A language that takes our emotions seriously and gives them real weight in our lives encourages us to think and be and act differently.

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

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.

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.

God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be comforted, it is our embrace, not God's, that will comfort them.

For me as a woman pride is not really sin, but rather something that I still have to learn. The male conception of the person who rebels against God by affirming himself, by acting proudly, arrogantly, and without constraints, is not a woman's concern. Rather, we women are in danger of not developing any pride, of never becoming independent, of constantly remaining within too narrow boundaries.