Quotes from Jonathan Rieder

We are gravely mistaken if we feel that Christianity is a religion to protect us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that there is a Good Friday before every Easter, and that the cross we bear always precedes the crown we wear.

King rejects churches that embrace "a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, unbiblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular." But

Nothing in the "Letter," nothing in the bedlam of Birmingham or its bittersweet aftermath, suggest that King viewed America as a providential nation whose destiny was freedom. Rather, that exceptional nation first had to be created by the exceptionally brave and spiritual people of the civil rights movement.

After proclaiming as a virtual destiny that the oppressor could not possibly understand or empathize with the oppressed, King was offering white oppressors a second chance; they might be clueless but not hopeless. Maybe interracial understanding was possible after all. Maybe they could respond to the cry for justice if they could first feel the injustice. As

He took aim at the core of American culture, the vast universe of people who imagined themselves to be decent but never dwelled on the shame of American racism.

Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation."15 Tellingly,

The time is always right to do what is right. Now is the time to realize the American dream. Now is the time to transform the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into a glowing daybreak of justice and freedom." Such

If you end up doing nothing but praying we will be living in segregation two hundred or three hundred years from now … God will never allow prayer to become a substitute for working intelligence.

Looking back in 1964, King observed, "Negroes have straightened their backs in Albany. And once a man straightens his back you can't ride him anymore.

Instead of sitting down at lunch counters, Wallace vowed to stand in the entranceway to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama.