I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

Each time we look upon the poor, on the farmworkers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton... remember, there is the face of Christ.

Our position in Christ Jesus is enhanced each time we help someone in trouble.

During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved--which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family.

She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, "Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

Look around and see whom you can serve.

Sigh: who was it who said that to get into heaven, you needed a letter of recommendation from the poor?

Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days -- the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start -- and that's where Jesus will be.

Look around and see whom you can serve. This will fill you.

Everyone has a problem, a desire, and a narrative. Who will you seek to serve?

Compassion is the basis of morality.

It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.