Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural, but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.

God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.

The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.

Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age

The Eucharist has been preempted and redefined in dualistic thinking that leaves the status quo of the world untouched, so congregations can take the meal without raising questions of violence; the outcome is a "colonized imagination" that is drained of dangerous hope.