Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.

On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition.

While the Passover narrative [in Exodus] energizes Israel's imagination toward justice, Israel's hard work of implementation of that imaginative scenario was done at Mt. Sinai. . . . Moses' difficult work at Sinai is to transform the narrative vision of the Exodus into a sustainable social practice that has institutional staying-power, credibility, and authority.

Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.

And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor.

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