The church can no longer afford preachers who fail to take a stand when they know that the church is facilitating evil, whether it’s a war based on lies, cruelty toward gays based on fear, or a distortion of the wisdom of Jesus as fantastic as the prosperity gospel.

The good life is thereby widely confused with unrestrained indulgence made possible by nonempathetic self-absorption.

Where there is denial there is dysfunction, and the more one’s faith resembles a fairy tale the sooner the clock strikes midnight.

Preaching is, after all, an audacious and dangerous act.

Churches are political even when they refuse to act politically, because silence is a form of complicity and thus an endorsement of the status quo.

Jesus did not come to die, rendering his life and teaching secondary. He died because of his life and teachings.

We know that those who challenge the status quo and do so with both conviction and charisma are at risk of being killed.

It is a “terrible trivialization,” Crossan writes, “to imagine that all Jesus’ followers lost their faith on Good Friday and had it restored by apparitions on Easter Sunday.

It is easier and much more satisfying to rail against the Right than to suggest that we go back to Genesis 1 and study together. Liberals can be just as intolerant as fundamentalists, and we have arrived at a moment in human history when intolerance and hope are mutually exclusive. (p. 6)

The most twisted but perennial of American myths is that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. (p. 174)