ACTION’s 21st Annual Banquet, 2024 Keynote Address.

“The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous.” - William James

“People have always been possessed…”

“She is endlessly on guard against the power of the collectivity.”

"With regard to human affairs, not to laugh, not to cry, not to become indignant, but to understand." - Spinoza

God is at work in your life on this side of eternity, and it’s always for the sake of your neighbor.

To undergo suffering and death joyfully was from the very beginning considered a sign of grace in the Christian martyrs - as though grace could do more for a human being than it could for Christ.

…the church is not merely a sect, community, or movement. Instead, it is a transhistorical intercourse.

When we speak of the church of the poor, we are not using Marxist dialectic, as though there were another church of the rich.

Woe to us when, lulled by false visions of flourishing, we see no need for the world to be overcome.

Our vision of the other, especially those considered the least and lowest, finds healing clarity in the Mass.

“Pray first of all to receive the gift of tears,” writes Evagrius of Pontus, “in order to soften the hardness of your heart by 'breaking' it.”

"But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen! - W.E.B. Du Bois

When they are sent out into the world, it is a continuum of a sanctified work begun in the sanctuary at the altar. Action starts with praise.

“In gathering together for Christian worship, men and women compromise themselves politically.”

Has growth robbed me of maturity?

Sara Maitland

Marilynne Robinson

the hyper-focus of emotional comfort subjectively used in exclusionary ways

“Thus, without thought, without intent, we make mere echoes of ourselves…”