70 Quotes by Jamie Arpin-Ricci

If our social justice is guided by retribution, we will simply perpetuate the use and abuse of power to inflict violence.

Strength of conviction for ones faith is celebrated by the church- except when that conviction runs contrary to the status quo.

If our desire for justice is not rooted primarily in the pursuit of restoration, then reconciliation will be nearly impossible to achieve. It is precisely because grace is undeserved that makes it grace.

Disgust is a learned behaviour that finds fertile soil in ignorance, yielding a bountiful harvest of alienation, oppression, and hate.

The fire of fear blazes with the fuel of ignorance leaving nothing but the ashes of hate behind.

If your orthodoxy doesn't fully affirm compassion- if it is not, itself, deeply compassionate- then it is no orthodoxy at all.

Often it is the poor who recognize emptiness before the rest of us—and for obvious reasons. While I am not suggesting that poverty predisposes people to some form of righteousness, I have seen how their circumstances often free them from much of the pretense that our relative privilege affords us. So while the poor are not godlier on the basis of their poverty, they are often at least more authentic in their brokenness, and thus, perhaps, closer to honestly recognizing what true emptiness is.

When Mary asserts explicitly that God is on the side of the poor, we can understand it within the tension of what it means to be blessed as the poor in spirit. Rather than elevating poverty to a form of righteousness, Jesus is instead calling for a revolution of imagination around the nature of what we consider true blessing. Jesus is here declaring that the humble and repentant heart is the fertile soil of his kingdom.

Selective solidarity exposes the self-serving impulse to bolster ones ego (and ease ones conscience), all while avoiding the necessarily difficult and costly practices of allyship for the cheap knock-off of performative compassion.