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When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows. Martin Luther King, Jr, ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ in Why We Can’t Wait ( Mentor, 1963), 90.

Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they ordinarily incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus, both conceptual and manipulative, that the traditional paradigm had previously employed. But they seldom employ these borrowed elements in quite the traditional way. Within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships one with the other. The inevitable result is what we must call…a misunderstanding between two competing schools. The laymen who scoffed at Einstein’s general theory of relativity because space could not be “curved”—it was not that sort of thing—were not simply wrong or mistaken. Nor were mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who tried to develop a Euclidean version of Einstein’s theory. What had previously been meant by space was necessarily flat, homogenous, isotropic, and unaffected by the presence of matter. If it had not been, Newton’s physics would not have worked. To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, I & II (U of Chicago, 1970), 149.

A new way of being in the world…presses us beyond stewardship of life on earth to solidarity with all earth’s creatures, especially the vulnerable. The Christian shape for humanity is built upon our evolutionary distinction, but it is also a radical intensification of it. Thus, we have been decentered as the point and goal of creation and recentered as God’s partners in helping creation to grow ad prosper in our tiny part of God’s body. Sally McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (SCM, 1993), 197.

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking.

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein, www.heartquotes.net/Einstein

No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children. Rabbi Irving Greenberg, President of the Jewish Life Network/ Steinhardt Foundation