6 Quotes by Jonathan Rieder

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.