Quotes about Social

The church has lost the chance of becoming the unifying element in our American society. It is not anticipating any facts. It is merely catching up very slowly to the new social facts created by economic and other forces. The American melting pot is doing its work. The churches merely represent various European cultures, lost in the amalgam of American life and maintaining a separate existence only in religion.

Teachers of morals who do not see the difference between the problem of charity within the limits of an accepted social system and the problem of justice between economic groups, holding uneven power within modern industrial society, have simply not faced the most obvious differences between the morals of groups and those of individuals.

Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

For five hundred years, Christian teachers defined and redefined salvation almost entirely in individualistic terms, while well-disguised social evils—greed, pride, ambition, deceit, gluttony—moved to the highest levels of power and influence, even in our churches.

Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion. When we do, these are legitimated as a proper way of life. God saves by loving and including, not by excluding or punishing.

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling

Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart."5

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.

to lift a man by education from one social stratum to another is to expose him to a terrible temptation—the temptation to despise his own people.

Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on.