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

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.

There is no wrong suffering. There is imaginary, sham, feigned, simulated, pretended suffering. But the assertion that someone suffers for the right or wrong reason presupposes a divine, all-penetrating judgment able to distinguish historically obsolete forms of suffering from those in our time, instead of leaving this decision to the sufferers themselves.

A competitive society is a society of envy.

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

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.

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