“
The "war" is being fought along the line between sin and righteousness in every family. It is being fought along the line between truth and falsehood in every school... Between justice and injustice in every legislature... Between integrity and corruption in every office... Between love and hate in every ethnic group... Between pride and humility in every sport... Between the beautiful and the ugly in every art... Between right doctrine and wrong doctrine in every church... Between sloth and diligence between coffee breaks. It is not a waste to fight the battle for truth and faith and love on any of these fronts.
”
”
John Piper (Don't Waste Your Life)
“
We are witnessing a rebellion. It's beautiful to see the qty of protests and the scope and breadth of all colors, all genders, all sexual orientations, all ethnicities and all religious identities in the USA.
”
”
Cornel West
“
I believe that we are all one family in Christ despite our ethnicity, but each of us as unique distinctions and gifts. That's how God desires us to live. To say we don't see color is to say we don't see the beauty of that diverse kingdom.
”
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Lecrae Moore (I Am Restored: How I Lost My Religion but Found My Faith)
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How do you know if someone loves herself? No hairstyle, religion, or ethnicity has ownership of self-love or a greater propensity toward self-hatred. The best way to tell if a woman loves herself is by how she treats herself and others. She makes self-loving choices.
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Abiola Abrams (The Sacred Bombshell Handbook of Self-Love)
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It is inconceivable to the dominant culture that it should respect as a political allegiance, as deep as any ethnic or racial pride, a woman’s determination to show her loyalty—in the face of a beauty myth as powerful as myths about white supremacy—to her age, her shape, her self, her life.
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Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
“
I don't subscribe to ideas of this nation versus that nation or this race versus that race, or one ethnicity versus the other ethnicity. We are one humanity; one Earth; one global society that hosts a multitude of beautifully diverse groups. We should cherish our diversity as we embrace our oneness.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
If you’d like to grasp the full beauty of God’s creation, see color. Instead of pretending like we are color-blind, let’s celebrate God’s creation. Ethnic differences aren’t the result of the Fall; celebrate the unique beauty of each and look forward to seeing heaven filled with the colors of all nations.
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Russell D. Moore (The Gospel & Racial Reconciliation)
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Dear Young Black Males, Show respect for our young sistas. They are young Queens, and you’re young Kings. Black is beautiful, period. If you’re one of those young men who put light-skinned women on a pedestal, but look down on dark-skinned young ladies, stop it! Black women come in all shades, and all black families have all shades within their families. It’s one thing to have a preference, and that’s okay, but don’t belittle the other. Respect, appreciate, and protect our sistas. In closing: We already have to deal with race related crap from other ethnic groups, so why add to it amongst our own? We need to build each other up and be united as one, no matter what our skin tone is. Don’t physically or mentally abuse your young Queen. Respect her just like you’d like your mother, grandmother, or sister to be respected by another male. There’s nothing attractive or cool about mistreating a woman. Nothing at all!
”
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Stephanie Lahart
“
Words evolve, perhaps more rapidly and tellingly than do their users, and the change in meanings reflects a society often more accurately than do the works of many historians. In he years preceding the first collapse of NorAm, the change in the meaning of one word predicted the failure of that society more immediately and accurately than did all the analysts, social scientists, and historians. That critical word? 'Discrimination.' We know it now as a term meaning 'unfounded bias against a person, group, or culture on the basis of racial, gender, or ethnic background.' Prejudice, if you will.
The previous meaning of this word was: 'to draw a clear distinction between good and evil, to differentiate, to recognize as different.' Moreover, the connotations once associated with discrimination were favorable. A person of discrimination was one of taste and good judgment. With the change of the meaning into a negative term of bias, the English language was left without a single-word term for the act of choosing between alternatives wisely, and more importantly, left with a subterranean negative connotation for those who attempted to make such choices.
In hindsight, the change in meaning clearly reflected and foreshadowed the disaster to come. Individuals and institutions abhorred making real choices. At one point more than three-quarters of the youthful population entered institutions of higher learning. Credentials, often paper ones, replaced meaning judgment and choices... Popularity replaced excellence... The number of disastrous cultural and political decisions foreshadowed by the change in meaning of one word is truly endless...
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L.E. Modesitt Jr. (Archform: Beauty (Archform: Beauty, #1))
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[Author's Note:] When my grandmother came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, she was a beautiful, glamorous woman from a wealthy family in the capital city, and the young bride of a dashing naval officer. She expected to be received as such. Instead, she found that people here had a very reductionist view of what it meant to be Puerto Rican, of what it meant to be Latinx. Everything about her confused her new neighbors: her skin tone, her hair, her accent, her notions. She wasn't what they expected a boricua to be.
My grandmother spent much of her adult life in the States but didn't always feel welcome here. She resented the perpetual gringo misconceptions about her. She never got past that resentment, and the echoes of her indignation still have some peculiar manifestations in my family today. One of the symptoms is me. Always raging against a perceived slight, always fighting against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture. I'm acutely aware that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique. I feel this awareness in my spine, in my DNA.
So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories - a work of fiction - as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: these people are people.
”
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Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
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Fewer than 5 percent of Danes attend church. In godless Denmark, the national government funds a high quality education for all children, rich and poor alike, while in God-fearing America, education is funded through local property taxes, so neighborhood and income dictate a child’s educational opportunities. Add in race and ethnicity factors to create a perfectly stratified school system segregated by educational opportunity.
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Frank Schaeffer (Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God: How to give love, create beauty and find peace)
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Places of genius challenge us. They are difficult. They do not earn their place in history with ethnic restaurants or street festivals, but by provoking us, making demands of us. Crazy, unrealistic, beautiful demands.
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Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley)
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For the foreseeable future, racial and ethnic inequality will be a feature of American life. This reality is not cause for despair. The idea that we may never reach a state of perfect racial equality—a perfect racial equilibrium—is not cause for alarm. What is concerning is the real possibility that we, as a society, will choose not to care. We will choose to be blind to injustice and the suffering of others. We will look the other way and deny our public agencies the resources, data, and tools they need to solve problems. We will refuse to celebrate what is beautiful about our distinct cultures and histories, even as we blend and evolve. That is cause for despair.
”
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
Black men, I discovered, are just as obsessed with hair as black women are. His dating history included various ethnicities, many of whose hair could have been packaged and put on the shelf at a Korean beauty salon. That silky shit.
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Issa Rae (The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl)
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Our Kingdom call is to revolt against the Powers by dismantling the hierarchy of privilege, rejecting all racial stereotypes and judgments, forging meaningful relationships across ethnic lines, and submitting ourselves to one another as we listen, learn, and follow one another.
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Gregory A. Boyd (The Myth of a Christian Religion: Losing Your Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution)
“
I think the ambiguity of her beauty is part of her appeal. Something elusive and indefinable. I would never have guessed the ethnicities that coalesced to make a face like hers—the wide, full lips, copper skin and striking bone structure. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone like her. Hers is not a face you would soon forget. Maybe never.
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Kennedy Ryan (Long Shot (Hoops, #1))
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Yet, I believe that, as Latinos, we have a particular predisposition to fantasize and romanticize the past because our complicated relationship with colonialism has not only distorted our perceptions of good and evil, but it has also allowed us to view ourselves as both the victors and the oppressed, as both the colonizers and the colonized. Both the beauty and the curse of our history as Latinos lie in the way our race and ethnicities are deeply mixed and intertwined.
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Paola Ramos (Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America)
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Asia so degraded, so corrupted by the colonial era and by its own crowdedness that it can only choose between depravity and the puritan orgy of communIsm.
The women of Thailand are so beautiful that they have become the hostesses of the Western world, sought after and desired everywhere for their grace, which is that of a submissive and affectionate femininity of nubile slaves - now dressed by Dior - an astounding sexual come-on in a gaze which looks you straight in the eye and a potential acquiescence to your every whim. In short, the fulfilment of Western man's dreams. Thai women seem spontaneously to embody the sexuality of the Arabian Nights, like the Nubian slaves in ancient Rome. Thai men, on the other hand, seem sad and forlorn; their physiques are not in tune with world chic, while their women's are privileged to be the currently fashionable form of ethnic beauty. What is left for these men but to assist in the universal promotion of their women for high-class prostitution?
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
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I’ve met people in just about every shape and form in which they exist. And never, not ever, have I found a kind of people that is not breathtakingly gorgeous. Of course, all the world’s nationalities and ethnicities meet and mix in America, more than in any other country, and the results all are beautiful. What’s not beautiful to me is the typical advertising of women. I see it in all the world’s cities now: enormous billboards cast two stories high, parading some phony Western ideal of beauty—tall, bone thin, and mainly white.
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Mark Lauren (Body by You: The You Are Your Own Gym Guide to Total Women's Fitness)
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The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.
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Padma Lakshmi (Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir)
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I often think about the world’s religions and ethnicities. It seems to me that God, or the Universe, has wondrously created each of us as a facet of a diamond: each facet is different, and together the facets form a diamond that is brilliant and beautiful. It is the uniqueness that makes the diamond beautiful. Every belief system is beautiful in its knowledge. No one is better than anyone else. This is merely the illusion of the physical world. Only when we can celebrate our diversity and love one another unconditionally will there be true peace on this planet. Because we have not learned love yet, we still kill our own species.
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James Van Praagh (Ghosts Among Us: Uncovering the Truth About the Other Side)
“
Some people will tell you that Toronto, in the summer, is the nothing more than a cesspool of pollution, garbage, and the smells of a hundred ethnicities competing for top spot in a race won historically by curry, garlic, and the occasional cauldron of boiled cabbage. Take a walk down College Street West, Gerrard Street East, or the Danforth, and you'll see; then, they add—these people, complaining—that the stench is so pervasive, so incorrigible, nor merely for lack of wind, but for the ninety-nine percent humidity, which, after a rainstorm, adds an eradicable bottom-note of sweaty Birkenstocks and the organic tang of decaying plant life. This much is true; there is, however, more to the story. Take a walk down the same streets and you'll find racks of the most stunning saris—red with navy brocade, silver, canary, vermillion and chocolate; marts with lahsun and adrak, pyaz and pudina; windows of gelato, zeppole, tiramisu; dusty smoke shops with patio-bistros; you'll find dove-white statuary of Olympian goddesses, mobs in blue jerseys, primed for the World Cup—and more, still, the compulsory banter of couples who even after forty years can turn foul words into the bawdiest, more unforgettable laughter (and those are just the details). Beyond them is the container, the big canvas brushed with parks and valleys and the interminable shore; a backdrop of ferries and islands, gulls and clouds—sparkles of a million wave-tips as the sun decides which colours to leave on its journey to new days. No, Toronto, in the summer, is the most paradisiacal place in the world.
”
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Kit Ingram (Paradise)
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Dear father,
It's been five years today, but makes no difference! Not a day goes by without me remembering your pure green eyes, the tone of your voice singing In Adighabza, or your poems scattered all around the house.
Dear father, from you I have learned that being a girl doesn't mean that I can't achieve my dreams, no matter how crazy or un-urban they might seem. That you raised me with the utmost of ethics and morals and the hell with this cocooned society, if it doesn't respect the right to ask and learn and be, just because I'm a girl.
Dear father, from you I have learned to respect all mankind, and just because you descend from a certain blood or ethnicity, it doesn't make you better than anybody else. It's you, and only you, your actions, your thoughts, your achievements, are what differentiates you from everybody else. At the same time, thank you for teaching me to respect and value where I came from, for actually taking me to my hometown Goboqay, for teaching me about my family tree, how my ancestors worked hard and fought for me to be where I am right now, and to continue on with the legacy and make them all proud.
Dear father, from you and mom, I have learned to speak in my mother tongue. A gift so precious, that I have already made a promise to do the same for my unborn children.
Dear father, from you I have learned to be content, to fear Allah, to be thankful for all that I have, and no matter what, never loose faith, as it's the only path to solace.
Dear father, from you I have learned that if a person wants to love you, then let them, and if they hurt you, be strong and stand your ground. People will respect you only if you respect yourself.
Dear father, I'm pretty sure that you are proud of me, my sisters and our dear dear Mom. You have a beautiful grand daughter now and a son in-law better than any brother I would have ever asked for.
Till we meet again, Shu wasltha'3u.
الله يرحمك يا غالي. (الفاتحة) على روحك الطاهرة.
”
”
Larissa Qat
“
As a black man Al, who went through the Civil rights fight in the 60s just like you did, and saw the first freedom bus burn in my home town of Anniston, Alabama, on May 14, 1961; I hated Dr. King for his non-violent philosophy. That did not change until I became a Christian later in life. Then I understood God’s biblical truth of love your enemy and do good to those who hate and persecute you. I think I have the right to tell you this sir; I think the likes of you and Jesse Jackson have done more damage to the black race than any white man will ever accomplish. You see as long as you can produce an ethnicity with a victim mentality to keep them in poverty, as the two of you get richer – you know like poverty pimps – and convince them that it is the white man’s fault because he has his boot on their necks, and as long as you teach our beautiful black women that there is a government out there to be their baby’s daddy, the two of you win. You are the self-proclaimed, appointed leaders of the black people. How we as black people have swallowed the lie that we have to have certain black leaders to get on the government teat escapes me.
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Ken Hutcherson
“
At 5pm every weekday,,,JB got on the subway and headed for his studio in Long Island City. The weekday journey was his favorite: He'd board at Canal and watch the train fill and empty at each stop with an ever-shifting mix of different peoples and ethnicities, the car's population reconstituting itself every ten blocks or so into provocative and improbably constellations of Poles, Chinese, Koreans, Senegalese; Senegalese, Dominicans, Indians, Pakistanis; Pakistanis, Irish, Salvadorans, Mexicans; Mexicans, Sri Lankans, Nigerians, and Tibetans - the only thing uniting them being their newness to America and their identical expressions of exhaustion, that blend of determination and resignation that only the immigrant possesses....
The other aspect of those weekday-evening trips he loved was the light itself, how it filled the train with something living as the cars rattled across the bridge, how it washed the weariness from his seat-mates' faces and revealed them as they were when they first came to the county, when they were young and America seemed conquerable. He'd watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine.
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Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
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Every once in a while during the preparation of these lectures, I find myself asking — and others asking me — what's the relevance of all this musico-linguistics? Can it lead us to an answer of Charles Ives' Unanswered Question — whither music? — and even if it eventually can, does it matter? The world totters, governments crumble, and we are poring over musical phonology, and now syntax. Isn't it a flagrant case of elitism?
Well, in a way it is; certainly not elitism of class — economic, social, or ethnic — but of curiosity, that special, inquiring quality of the intelligence. And it was ever thus. But these days, the search for meaning-through-beauty and vice versa becomes even more important as each day mediocrity and art-mongering increasingly uglify our lives; and the day when this search for John Keats' truth-beauty ideal becomes irrelevant, then we can all shut up and go back to our caves. Meanwhile, to use that unfortunate word again, it is thoroughly relevant; and I as a musician feel that there has to be a way of speaking about music with intelligent but nonprofessional music lovers who don't know a stretto from a diminished fifth; and the best way I have found so far is by setting up a working analogy with language, since language is something everyone shares and uses and knows about.
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Leonard Bernstein (The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard)
“
she pairs real plants with their illustrated counterparts on beautiful posters from the Dutch label My Deer Art. To break up the style, she adds her own botanical frames with dried leaves. The entire look has a striking effect, mixing depth, textures and sizes. Another favourite prop for plant stylings are woven baskets with ethnic patterns – Pepper uses these to cover up unspectacular plant pots and thus adds a bohemian vibe to her houseplants.
”
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Igor Josifovic (Urban Jungle: Living and Styling with Plants)
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colorblindness is such a bad idea, though, why have people across the political spectrum become so attached to it? For conservatives, the ideal of colorblindness is linked to a commitment to individualism. In their view, society should be concerned with individuals, not groups. Gross racial disparities in health, wealth, education, and opportunity should be of no interest to our government, and racial identity should be a private matter, something best kept to ourselves. For liberals, the ideal of colorblindness is linked to the dream of racial equality. The hope is that one day we will no longer see race because race will lose all of its significance. In this fantasy, eventually race will no longer be a factor in mortality rates, the spread of disease, educational or economic opportunity, or the distribution of wealth. Race will correlate with nothing; it will mean nothing; we won’t even notice it anymore. Those who are less idealistic embrace colorblindness simply because they find it difficult to imagine a society in which we see race and racial differences yet consistently act in a positive, constructive way. It is easier to imagine a world in which we tolerate racial differences by being blind to them. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that racial differences will always exist among us. Even if the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration were completely overcome, we would remain a nation of immigrants (and indigenous people) in a larger world divided by race and ethnicity. It is a world in which there is extraordinary racial and ethnic inequality, and our nation has porous boundaries. For the foreseeable future, racial and ethnic inequality will be a feature of American life. This reality is not cause for despair. The idea that we may never reach a state of perfect racial equality—a perfect racial equilibrium—is not cause for alarm. What is concerning is the real possibility that we, as a society, will choose not to care. We will choose to be blind to injustice and the suffering of others. We will look the other way and deny our public agencies the resources, data, and tools they need to solve problems. We will refuse to celebrate what is beautiful about our distinct cultures and histories, even as we blend and evolve. That is cause for despair. Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
But not everyone is resigned to this reality. People with more-fluid worldviews tend to abhor negative racial and ethnic stereotypes. They are less innately fearful of difference, a quality that gives them the leeway to embrace variety. If they hear people speaking different languages, it’s likely to put a smile on their face, not annoy them. A picture of a diverse group of people getting along will probably warm their hearts, providing them with a profound sense of comfort and affirming their view that the very differences between people are what makes the world a beautiful place.
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Marc Hetherington (Prius Or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide)
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Reconciliation is not a magic word that we can trot out whenever we need healing or inspiration. Deep down, I think we know this is true, because our efforts to partake of an easy reconciliation have proved fruitless in the world. Too often, our discussions of race are emotional but not strategic, our outreach work remains paternalistic, and our ethnic celebrations fetishize people of color. Many champions of racial justice in the Church has stopped using the term altogether, because it has been so watered down from its original potency.
In their book Radical Reconciliation, Curtiss DeYoung and Allan Boesak unpack why this happens. They write, "reconciliation is revolutionary, that is, oriented to structural change." Which means, reconciliation can never be apolitical. Reconciliation chooses sides, and the side is always justice.
This is why white American churches remain so far from experiencing anything resembling reconciliation. The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse. And so, rather than seeking reconciliation, they stage moments of racial harmony that don't challenge the status quo. They organize worship services where the choir of two racially different churches sing together, where a pastor of a different race preaches a couple times a year, where they celebrate MLK but don't acknowledge current racial injustices. Acts like these can create beautiful moments of harmony and goodwill, but since they don't change the underlying power structure of the organization, it would be misleading to call them acts of reconciliation. Even worse, when they're not paired with greater change, diversity efforts can have the opposite of their intended effect. They keep the church feeling good, innocent, maybe even progressive, allt he while preserving the roots of injustice.
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Austin Channing Brown
“
As a group which believed in civic responsibility and the salutary effect of applied social science, it was natural that the WASP elite would take an interest in housing. In cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston, the panels of experts in the housing field invariably had a definite ethnic cast. They became certified as experts either by going to the already mentioned Ivy League universities or by getting appointed to boards of the various cities’ planning commissions, which were often descendants of local ruling class initiatives that began with the city-beautiful movement or the settlement house movement around the time of World War I.
The Philadelphia Housing Association was one such group. It started off as a blueblood organization complaining about backyard privies and piggeries in South Philadelphia and recommending common-sense measures for local improvement of the housing situation, things like liens against absentee landlords to pay for repairs. All of that changed in 1937 with the New Deal housing act of that year, which established local housing authorities across the country with federal money and government authority. The various housing authorities were charged with creating master plans by staffs of “experts” of a certain ethnic (i.c., WASP) cast which was invariably not the ethnic cast of the neighborhoods which were targeted for destruction. Urban renewal as practiced in the case of Berman v. Parker meant that certain people were empowered to come up with a master plan for the cities, one that would now have the power of law, specifically eminent domain, behind it along with enormous amounts of federal money, which was made available to tear down neighborhoods where people from other ethnic groups lived. The experts could do this according to their own purportedly scientific but ultimately ethnocentric criteria of things like blight, hygiene, decay, etc. Taken together the WASP penchant for meddling in housing along with residual WASP anti-Catholicism meant bad news for places like Bridesburg and Poletown, especially when this group was empowered to act on its ethnic prejudices by federal money and a Supreme Court that was willing to abridge property rights in the interest of increased social engineering.
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E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
“
Those words they throw at you and which stick onto you -- I know they hurt. But remember, you are beautiful for who you are. Not for your ethnicity or your relationship to others. Don't play into a part society creates for you or feel as if you need to be a certain way to be loved and accepted. You are not their object, their doll, or their magical dream. You are not their yellow fantasy.
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Giboom Park (Not Your Yellow Fantasy: Deconstructing the Legacy of Asian Fetishization)
“
Just because you don't know the exact country or tribe that your ancestors descended from, doesn't mean they aren't apart of your ethnic make-up. Black history didn't begin in slavery, we have a beautiful royal dynasty that began around 830 CE (CE is the correct term to use, most people know this as AD). My visits to Nigeria gave me a sense of pride to be connected to such a rich history that will never be taken away from me.-part of an excerpt from my second book, Ebony Jones
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Ebony Jones-Kuye
“
Everyone knew Sonja was destined for great things, but no one knew what to do with her until then. Even in academia, her natural habitat, she was an exotic species. Though her Russianness gave her certain dispensations, the idea that a young woman of any ethnicity could so excel in the hard sciences was a far-fetched fantasy. Their parents encouraged her at a distance. Neither understood the molecular formulas, electromagnetic fields, or anatomical minutiae that so captivated her, and so their support came by way of well-intentioned, inadequate generalities. Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja’s gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn’t need MDs to know how to be proud of her.
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Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
“
Jewel Hyun, a Korean American woman, became engaged in global ministry later in life. She enjoyed meeting with me as she prepared for ministry trips, during which she would speak in other countries at conferences. On one occasion she was preparing for a trip to East Africa, where she would be speaking to women who had suffered displacement as refugees as the result of an ethnic genocide. She was concerned about how she could "connect" with these women who lived in such a different world.
If you just met jewel, who looks very distinguished, you would never know that her childhood years included fleeing from North Korea and living with her family as refugees. I knew her story, so I responded, "Tell them your own story."
"Why would they want to hear my story?" she replied.
"Because when these women look at you, they will think to themselves, `This is a nice lady with beautiful clothes and manicured fingernails. She's nice, but she has no idea of the life we've lived.' When you tell them your story, you will be a living representative of hope for them."
Jewel told me later that her story connected her deeply to the women, as they realized that she too had shared in the fellowship of suffering.
”
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Paul Borthwick (Western Christians in Global Mission: What's the Role of the North American Church?)
“
But in general one senses a certain inauthenticity in saddling public schools with the mission of convincing children of the beauties of their particular ethnic origins. Ethnic subcultures, if they had genuine vitality, would be sufficiently instilled in children by family, church, and community. It is surely not the office of the public school to promote artificial ethnic chauvinism.
”
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society)
“
So much was lost - names, faces, ages, ethnic identities - that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together, knowing that some pieces will never be recovered. This is not quite as harrowing or hopeless as it might sound I liken it to the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken vessels using gold. The scars of the object are not concealed, but highlighted and embraced, thus giving them their own dignity and power. The brokenness and its subsequent repair are a recognized part of the story of the journey of the vessel, not to be obscured, and change, transition, and transformation are seen as important as honoring the original structure and its traditional meaning and beauty.
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Michael W. Twitty (The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South)
“
As Lucy Hughes-Hallett (1990: 253) puts it, her reputation for beauty, though unsupported by any historical evidence, was unassailable, but it was not consonant with the possibility of her being any other than a light-skinned European lady, for in fiction beauty (as distinct from sexual magnetism) has traditionally been the prerogative of social and ethnic élites … the vast majority of pre-nineteenth-century writers and artists simply circumvented [this problem] by abolishing Cleopatra's foreignness and changing her appearance to suit their own ideals.
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Richard Dyer (White: Essays on Race and Culture)
“
Among more than 11,000 long-term couples, machine learning models found that the traits listed below, in a mate, were among the least predictive of happiness with that mate. Let’s call these traits the Irrelevant Eight, as partners appear about as likely to end up happy in their relationship when they pair off with people with any combo of these traits: Race/ethnicity Religious affiliation Height Occupation Physical attractiveness Previous marital status Sexual tastes Similarity to oneself What should we make of this list, the Irrelevant Eight? I was immediately struck by an overlap between the list of irrelevant traits and another data-driven list discussed in this chapter. Recall that I had previously discussed the qualities that make people most desirable as romantic partners, according to Big Data from online dating sites. It turns out that that list—the qualities that are most valued in the dating market, according to Big Data from online dating sites—almost perfectly overlaps with the list of traits in a partner that don’t correlate with long-term relationship happiness, according to the large dataset Joel and her coauthors analyzed. Consider, say, conventional attractiveness. Beauty, you will recall, is the single most valued trait in the dating market; Hitsch, Hortaçsu, and Ariely found in their study of tens of thousands of single people on an online dating site that who receives messages and who has their messages responded to can, to a large degree, be explained by how conventionally attractive they are. But Joel and her coauthors found, in their study of more than 11,000 long-term couples, that the conventional attractiveness of one’s partner does not predict romantic happiness. Similarly, tall men, men with sexy occupations, people of certain races, and people who remind others of themselves are valued tremendously in the dating market. (See: the evidence from earlier in this chapter.) But ask thousands of long-term couples and there is no evidence that people who succeeded in pairing off with mates with these desired traits are any happier in their relationship.
”
”
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life)
“
She looked out the taxi window at the picturesque Creole cottages and brick Spanish Colonial houses on the way back to the bakery. Piper could understand why New Orleans was an attractive location for filming. The culturally rich neighborhoods and diverse locations, from bayou to big city, provided vivid backdrops. There were willing extras of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities available, as well as state-of-the-art sound stages and plenty of skilled crew members. Piper also knew that Louisiana offered attractive tax incentives to the film industry to bring in business to New Orleans. The city was working hard to earn the moniker "Hollywood of the South.
”
”
Mary Jane Clark (That Old Black Magic (Wedding Cake Mystery, #4))
“
Women differ in the exact male height they prefer, but almost always prefer a man taller than themselves. Different ethnic groups may prefer different facial features, but all prefer faces that are symmetrical and averagely shaped for their population. If you don't look for the universals of human beauty at the right level of description, you will not find them.
”
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Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature)
“
- Afghanistan is like a beautiful mansion littered with garbage, and someone has to take out the garbage.
That’s what you were doing in Mazar, going door-to-door? Taking out the garbage?
- Precisely.
In the west, they have an expression for that. They call it ethnic cleansing.
- Do they? Ethnic cleansing. I like it. I like the sound of it.
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)
“
I am a Nakba survivor… When they arrived in Palestine in the 1880s, the Zionists said they were coming to a land without a people, and they continued to make this claim for decades. But look around you at these beautiful homes. This is just one of many Palestinian neighborhoods occupied by Israelis. Many of those homes were built before the Zionists came. They belonged to educated, sophisticated Palestinian families. Before the Nakba, Palestine, particularly Jerusalem, kept its doors open to people of all ethnic groups and creeds who wanted to pray or settle here. We Palestinians are proud to be part of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. We are here to stay, we, the survivors of the Palestinian Nakba.
”
”
Mona Hajjar Halaby (In My Mother's Footsteps: A Palestinian Refugee Returns Home)
“
The Catalonian photographed an old man struggling with the weight of his outmoded suitcase; a chef caught in a cloud of smoke at the back of a bistro. He found distinct beauty in ordinary things. Even in my sad countenance, how I couldn't look the boy in the eye, how I pinched my lips each time we kissed to reduce the evidence of my ethnicity.
He took to my solemnity, photographed my reading, eating, never giving way to a smile. This is love, I said, I know it, I feel it in the ease with which he takes to my seriousness and my unrelenting focus on the ground. But when you've been misused, you tend to view love as a type of sacrifice, or a numbing of the senses. You never let him please you, instead, you arch your back and offer the full view of your behind.
”
”
Lethokuhle Msimang (The Frightened)
“
The point of the BoPo movement isn’t necessarily for everyone to simply just “love” their bodies or feel positively about them, but rather, to take a stance against social norms and pressures of what society says beauty “should” be by bringing adequate representation to people of color, people of different ethnicities, people from LGBTQIA+ communities, older adults, and those with disabilities.44 But rather than bringing adequate representation and diversity to society’s ideal body standards, what has unfortunately happened is that many thin, fit, White, and conventionally attractive people, specifically cisgender White women, have taken its message to simply be “love yourself despite your ‘imperfections.’” They’ve taken something that wasn’t meant for them to be used to further validate their own beauty standards.
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Jamie Mills (The Easy Way Out: Why Bariatrics Isn't Cheating Obesity, It's Treating It)
“
Thus my peripatetic starving-artist years passed without hunger.
The always-unpopular chicken tights and pork shoulder,
combined with an untranslated pantry and daily effort,
made me richer, though unemployed, than an assistant professor.
Tofu, ruined for most by baking, quadrupled the meat in stir-fries.
No. 9 thin spaghetti could be lo mein, otherwise found in undersized
pouches under "Ethnic." Peeled broccoli stems, cut on the diagonal,
had the crispness of water chestnuts, minus the can. Picked animal
bones could be simmered into broth; to discard them was a crime.
Yesterday's rice, fried with frozen peas, an egg, and yesterday's ham,
made lunchtime new. Ugly leaves could hide in pot stickers,
on whose beauty many held forth, with none left over.
Scallion whites would not be privileged over greens. Rice bowls
had to be emptied. Thus my freedom--provided I made semi-annual
trips to gather basics, from whatever Asian grocery store could be found.
In some towns the shop would be Mexican; each helped the other out.
In any cased I could never get everything. Items were regionals,
names slightly off. Neither I nor the owner nor the food being local,
no one could explain. I'm reticent anyway in these contests,
speaking too little of what might be the wrong language,
knowing only the look and taste of the finished dish,
not what to call it.
But what I kept going back, wish list
in hand, never thinking of starvation, only of creativity:
that which I wanted to make, and that which had made me.
”
”
Adrienne Su (Peach State)
“
Silent morning
Quiet nature in dim light
It is almost peaceless of the chirping of birds
Waiting for the sunrise
Feeling satisfied with pure breath
Busy life- in pursuit of livelihood, running people
In the intensity of the wood-burning sun, astray finch
Sometimes the advent of north-wester
I’m scared
The calamitous heartache of the falling Caesalpinia pulcherrima!
Listen to get ears
Surprisingly I saw the unadulterated green weald
Vernal, yellow and crimson colors are the glorious beauty of the unique nature
An amazing reflection of Bengal
The housewife’s fringe of azure color sari fly in the gentle breeze
The cashew forest on the bank of flowing rivers white egret couple peep-bo
The kite crookedly flies get lost in the far unknown
The footstep of blustery childhood on the zigzag path
Standing on a head-high hill touches the fog
Beckoning with the hand of the magical horizon
The liveliness of a rainy-soaked juvenile
Momentary fascinated visibility of Ethnic group’s pineapple, tea, banana and jhum cultivation at the foot of the hill
Trailer- shrub, algae and pebble-stone come back to life in the cleanly stream of the fountain
Bumble bee is rudderless in the drunken smell of mountain wild flower
The heart of the most beloved is touched by pure love
In the distant sea water, pearl glow in the sunlight
Rarely, the howl of a hungry tiger float in the air from a deep forest
The needy fisherman’s hope and aspiration are mortgaged to the infinite sea
The waves come rushing on the beach delete the footprint to the beat of the dancing
The white cotton cloud is invisible in the bluey
The mew flies at impetuous speed to an unknown destination
A slice of happy smile at the bend of the wave
The western sky covered with the crimson glow of twilight
Irritated by the cricket’s endless acrid sound
The evening lamp is lit to flickering light of the firefly
The red crabs tittup wildly on the beach
Steadfast seeing
Sunset
A beautiful dream
Next sunrise.
”
”
Ashraful
“
Body positivity is about getting rid of harmful stereotypes and banishing false perceptions of beauty. It means developing a safe space where all bodies – no matter what their shape, size, age, ethnicity or physical ability – are accepted as equal.
Honouring this approach means putting an end to shaming comparisons of our own bodies with others; it means avoiding derogatory labels or putting some bodies on a pedestal.
All bodies are good bodies. All bodies are positive.
”
”
Rhyanna Watson
“
The Moslem people had brought an extraordinarily rich mixture of knowledge, beauty, and bloodshed to the Iberian peninsula; in the process Spain had been permanently transformed.
”
”
Nancy Rubin Stuart
“
I am prone to prefer people who are like me-- in color, culture, heritage and history..the creation of man and woman in the image of God with equal dignity before God..this means that no human being is more or less human that another..for in the process of discussing our diversity in terms of different "races," we are undercutting our unity in the human race..instead of being strictly tied to biology, ethnicity is much more fluid, factoring in social, cultural, lingual, historical, and even religious characteristics..The pages of the Bible and human history are thus filled with an evil affinity for ethnic animosity..God promises to bless these ethnic Israelites, but the purpose of his blessing extends far beyond them..[it is] his desire for all nations to behold his greatness and experience his grace..When Jesus comes to the earth in the New Testament, we are quickly introduced to him as an immigrant..he nevertheless reaches beyond national boundaries at critical moments to love, serve, teach, heal, and save Canaanites and Samaritans, Greeks and Romans..he came as Savior and Lord over all..Though Gentiles were finally accepted into the church, they felt at best like second-class Christians..the Bible doesn't deny the obvious ethnic, cultural, and historical differences that distinguish us from one another..diversifies humanity according to clans and lands as a creative reflection of his grace and glory in distinct groups of people. In highlighting the beauty of such diversity, the gospel thus counters the mistaken cultural illusion that the path to unity is paved by minimizing what makes us unique. Instead, the gospel compels us to celebrate our ethnic distinctions, value our cultural differences, and acknowledge our historical diversity..(In reference to Galations 3:28) some people might misconstrue this verse..to say that our differences don't matter. But they do..It is not my aim here to stereotype migrant workers..It is also not my aim to oversimplify either the plight of immigrants in our country or the predicament of how to provide for them..Consequently, followers of Christ must see immigrants not as problems to be solved but as people to be loved. The gospel compels us in our culture to decry any and all forms of oppression, exploitation, bigotry, or harassment of immigrants..[we] will stand as one redeemed race to give glory to the Father who calls us not sojourners or exiles, but sons and daughters.
”
”
David Platt (A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Abortion (Counter Culture Booklets))
“
All Bodies are equal
If we can shift the conversation away from what we think is wrong in ourselves to what is right in us and what is wrong in the way society treats us, we may just encourage people to start celebrating every body for the unique beauty no matter what size, shape, colour, age ethnicity or physical ability.
”
”
Rhyanna Watson
“
[...] ethnicity, defined as style could, like makeup, be easily applied and washed off.
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Kathy Peiss (Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture)
“
She looked as though she could be of any ethnicity, or of all at once--if "beautiful" and its synonyms and cognates weren't so diluted with every other word or phrase that they had ever been paired with, I would now employ them all in earnest. But to use descriptors of Helen of Troy would be to so utterly understate the matter that the severity of misdescription would plunge the language into total semantic collapse.
”
”
Jack Foster (Fresh Fruit: A Preface)
“
Page 207
In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks.
Page 208
At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!
”
”
Amy Chua (World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability)
“
Ultimately, diversity is about the value and dignity of people—ethnic minorities—whose unique voices have been overlooked or even silenced. It is about restoring beautiful missing pieces of the canvas of history that can enrich our view of the world, and of God. It is about acknowledging pains and injustices of power from the past.
”
”
Adrian Pei (The Minority Experience: Navigating Emotional and Organizational Realities)
“
Yes, Staten Island is the most Italian county in all of the United States, beating out even Meatball, Indiana. But the beauty of Staten Island is that anyone who lives there long enough, regardless of ethnicity, just becomes Italian.
”
”
Colin Jost (A Very Punchable Face)
“
Our national anthem is the symbols of our country.
it represents the tradition, history, and beliefs of our nation and its people.
We South Sudanese do not need President Kiir's presence to sing it.
Oh God
we Praise and Glorify you
For your grace on South Sudan
Land of great abundance
Uphold us United in Peace and Harmony
Whenever we are singing our national anthem with our chest up and our eyes in the sky, we feel the unity, love, peace and togetherness among us as Citizens of South Sudan.
Oh! Motherland
Arise, raise your flag with the guiding star
And sing-song of freedom with joy
For justice, Liberty and prosperity
shall forever reign,
The national anthem reminds Us of Our nation’s glory, beauty, rich heritage, and most importantly it is about us, and our martyrs who sacrificed their lives for our beautiful country South Sudan but not for only you Mr President.
Oh! great patriots
Let us stand up in silence and respect
saluting our martyrs whose blood
Cemented our national foundation,
we protect our nation
oh God blessed South Sudan
The national anthem helps evoke feelings of patriotism among us South Sudanese
It also helps us South Sudan united in peace and harmony by singing it.
The questions are: Who is President Kiir to deny us this feeling of Patriotism?
Does president Kiir's presence anywhere install that feeling in our heart?
Does Sudan Sudan mean President Kiir?
Was the national anthem composed for Mr President or for our nation, its heroes, heroines, martyrs and its people who you forbid from singing it today?
Therefore, we all feel the enthusiasm when we sing.. and we don't need your permission, Mr President.
Despite the tribal and ethnic differences, we rise in Unison and Listen or Sing the national anthem with great enthusiasm. Your Government took away our basic rights and gave us tribalism and hatred.
Now Mr. president you want to take away the only things that united us.
Therefore, we all feel the enthusiasm when we sing our national anthem and we don't need your permission, Mr President.
Note: People of South Sudan. Kiir and his government want to rewrite our history into Kiir story! Don't let them.
we vow to protect our nation not Kiir and now is the time for us Citizens of South Sudan to stand up for our country.
”
”
Abuzik Ibni Farajalla
“
All white nations now have sub-replacement fertility and almost all are receiving large numbers of non-white immigrants. Many say this should not be a cause for concern. Charles A. Price, Australia’s senior demographer, described in 2000 the change his country was going through: “Some people think that a steady replacement of Anglo-Celts by other ethnic groups is highly desirable. . . . Personally, [replacement] does not worry me . . . .”
Jozef Ritzen, Dutch Minister of Education, Culture, and Science, explained that “this is the trend worldwide. The white race will in the long term become extinct. . . . Apparently we are happy with this development.”
Tim Wise is a white person who has lectured on the evils of racism on more than 600 college campuses, and the Utne Reader named him one of “25 visionaries who are changing your world.” In an open letter to white American conservatives, he looked forward to the day when whites will be outnumbered by other races:
'We just have to be patient. And wait for your hearts to stop beating. And stop they will. And for some of you, real damned soon truth be told. Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of your demise is beautiful.
”
”
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
“
Narratives of mental illness are often white and middle-class, yet mental illness does not discriminate—it devastates regardless of race, gender, and ethnicity. Was it important for you to challenge that narrative, and to have a wide cast of characters from different backgrounds?
”
”
Mira T. Lee (Everything Here Is Beautiful)
“
The achievement of a community of peace is how the church demonstrates the wisdom of God to the principalities and powers. What the ruling principalities cannot produce in their world arranged around an axis of power enforced by violence, the church centered around an axis of love is to actually produce. This is accomplished as people are drawn from the entire spectrum of society—from the whole range of ethnic, social, economic, and political distinction—and formed into a new unified humanity called the body of Christ. As this happens, the church, as God’s new humanity in Christ, demonstrates the wisdom of God to a world bereft of peace in its arrangement around an axis of power. The creation of a peaceable people is proof of God’s wisdom!
”
”
Brian Zahnd (Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity)
“
He was about one eighty in height, that’s six foot in old money, and dressed in a beautifully tailored suit that emphasized the width of his shoulders and a trim waist. I thought early forties with long, finely boned features and brown hair cut into an old-fashioned side parting. It was hard to tell in the sodium light but I thought his eyes were gray. He carried a silver-topped cane and I knew without looking that his shoes were handmade. All he needed was a slightly ethnic younger boyfriend and I’d have had to call the cliché police.
”
”
Ben Aaronovitch (Midnight Riot (Rivers of London #1))