Quotes about Justice

Good ends will not justify evil actions. What

There are two ways of being a prophet. One is to tell the enslaved that they can be free. It is the difficult path of Moses. The second is to tell those who think they are free that they are in fact enslaved. This is the even more difficult path of Jesus.

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If

Governments encourage this pacification by various distractions, what used to be called "bread and circuses." They know it will keep us small, content, and uninterested in those "weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith" (Matthew 23:23) that have attracted all great souls. A

God's grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous—or it is hardly grace at all!

We recognized hierarchical or vertical accountability but almost no lateral accountability to one another—as Jesus hoped for the world when he prayed that we "all might be one" (John 17:21). A corporate reading of the Gospel gives hope and justice to history, but less control over individuals, which is probably why clergy who do the preaching don't like it too much and thus don't preach it too much.

It's time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation, not punishment.

Once a person recognizes that Jesus's mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and their authority.

It is not God who is violent. We are. It is not that God demands suffering of humans. We do. God does not need or want suffering—neither in Jesus nor in us.

Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of "salvation." Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not "think" right.

Two thousand years after Jesus lived here, Christians still have a hard time accepting his upside-down world, in which we are expected to work for justice on behalf of others but not to demand or expect it for ourselves (Matthew 5:6,10-12). This is one of the hardest challenges of Jesus' message. It demands an expanded heart and mind.

That as long as we keep God imprisoned in a retributive frame instead of a restorative frame, we really have no substantial good news;