"We have systems here to explain everything -- except how to live. And we have categories for every person on earth, but who can explain just one person?" ... "I have known human beings who, in the face of unbearable daily stress, respond with resilience, even nobility. And I have known others who live in a comfortable, even luxurious environment and yet seem utterly lost. We have both sides in all of us, and that's what the Bible says, isn't it? The Bible shows us both hope and doom, the possibility and the betrayal. In its stories, sometimes the favorite becomes fatally tempted and sometimes the lowly and obscure one becomes an agent of hope if not salvation. I believe those stories are a part of each one of us. We walk a tightrope, teetering between gloom, or the loss of faith, on the one hand, and a temptation towards self-importance and self-congratulation on the other. Both extremes lead to sin."

-- Dr. Robert Coles, from "Soul Survivor,"
by Philip Yancey

I have begun to realize how hard it is for a lot of people to think of living without someone to look down upon, really look down upon. It is not just that they will feel cheated out of someone to hate; it is that they will be compelled to look more closely at themselves, at what they don't like in themselves. My heart goes out to people I hear called rednecks; they have little, if anything, and hate is a possession they can still call upon reliably, and it works for them. I have less charity in my heart for well-to-do and well-educated people -- for their snide comments, cleverly rationalized ones, for the way they mobilize their political and even moral justifications to suit their own purposes. No one calls them into account. The Klan is their whipping boy. Someday all of us will see that when we start going after a race or a religion, a type, a region, a section of the Lord's humanity -- then we're cutting into His heart, and we're bleeding badly ourselves.

-- from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s personal interview
with Dr. Robert Coles,
"Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

A big danger for us is the temptation to follow the people we are opposing. They call us names, so we call them names. Our names may not be "redneck" or "cracker"; they may be names that have a sociological or psychological veneer to them, a gloss; but they are names, nonetheless -- "ignorant," or "brainwashed," or "duped" or "hysterical" or "poor-white" or "consumed by hate." I know you will give me plenty of evidence in support of those categories. But I urge you to think of them as that -- as categories; and I remind you that in many people, in many people called segregationists, there are other things going on in their lives; this person or that person, standing here or there may also be other things -- kind to neighbors and family, helpful and good-spirited at work.

You all know, I think, what I'm trying to say -- that we must try not to end up with stereotypes of those we oppose, even as they slip all of us into their stereotypes. And who are we? Let us not do to ourselves as others (as our opponents) do to us: try to put ourselves into one all-inclusive category -- the virtuous ones as against the evil ones, or the decent ones as against the malicious, prejudiced ones, or the well-educated as against the ignorant. You can see that I can go on and on -- and there is the danger: the "us" or "them" mentality takes hold, and we do, actually, begin to run the risk of joining ranks with the very people we are opposing.

-- from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s impromptu sermon
at the SNCC office,
"Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

The great societies of the West have been moving away from an underlying belief in the value of a single human soul. We tend to view history in terms of groups of people: classes, political parties, races, sociological groupings. We apply labels to each other, and explain behavior and ascribe worth on the basis of those labels. After prolonged exposure to Dr. Brand, I realized that I had been seeing large human problems in a mathematical model: percentages of Gross National Product, average annual income, mortality rate, doctors-per-thousand of population. Love, however, is not mathematical; we can never precisely calculate the greatest possible good to be applied equally to the world's poor and needy. We can only seek out one person, and then another, and then another, as objects for God's love.

-- "Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

"We doctors experience a rude awakening after medical school," Brand continued. "After studying the marvels of the human body, suddenly I was thrust into a position much like the complaint desk of a department store. Not once did a person visit my office to express appreciation for a beautifully functioning kidney or lung. They came to complain that something was not working properly. Only later did I realize that the very things they complained about were their greatest allies. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning. Who would ever visit a doctor apart from pain's warnings?

I noticed that the symptoms of illness my patients complained about were actually a display of bodily healing at work. Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust -- blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain -- demonstrates a reflex toward health. In all these things normally considered enemies, we can find a reason to be grateful."

...

As I listened to Brand, I realized I had been approaching God like a sick patient -- as if the Creator were running a complaint desk. I anguished over the tragedies, diseases, and injustices, all the while ignoring the many good things surrounding me in this world. Was it possible, I wondered, to retain a Chestertonian enthusiasm for the marvels of the natural world despite its apparent flaws? Like the psalmists, could I learn to praise and lament at the same time, with neither intonation drowning out the other?

-- "Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

How could a good God allow such a blemished world to exist? [Dr. Paul] Brand had responded to my complaints one by one. Disease? Did I know that of the twenty-four thousand species of bacteria, all but a few hundred are healthful, not harmful? Plants could not produce oxygen, nor could animals digest food without the assistance of bacteria. Indeed, bacteria constitute half of all living matter. Most agents of disease, he explained, vary from these necessary organisms in only slight mutations.

What about birth defects? He launched into a description of the complex biochemistry involved in producing one healthy child. The great wonder is not that birth defects occur but that millions more do not. Could a mistake-proof world have been created so that the human genome with its billions of variables would never err in transmission? No scientist could envision such an error-free system in our world of fixed physical laws.

...

Brand told me ... "I have a bookcase filled with surgical textbooks that describe operations people have devised for the injured hand: different ways to rearrange the tendons, muscles, and joints, ways to replace sections of bones and mechanical joints -- thousands of surgical procedures. But I know of no procedure that succeeds in improving a normal hand. For example, the best materials we use in artificial joint replacements generate five times as much friction as the body's natural joints, and these replacements may last only a few years. The only joints that need to be replaced are the few that have been grossly injured or fractured or the one that has worked well, as God designed, for many years and then gradually became arthritic and worn out in old age. After operating on thousands of hands, I must agree with Isaac Newton: 'In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence.'"

-- "Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

When the London Times asked a number of writers for essays on the topic "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton sent in the reply shortest and most to the point:

Dear Sirs:

I am.

Sincerely yours,
G.K. Chesterton

...

Chesterton himself said that the modern age is characterized by a sadness that calls for a new kind of prophet, not like prophets of old who reminded people that they were going to die, but someone who wouold remind them they are not dead yet.

-- "Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

Scott Simon put words to it in a National Public Radio editorial after the WTC attacks. Patriotism is not based on a blind belief that the United States has no need to change, he said. God knows we need to change in many ways. Our love for America rests on the belief that the changes needed are more likely to occur here than anywhere else in the world.

-- "Soul Survivor," by Philip Yancey

I believe that on the eve of a new millenium, it is time to break our silence. It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.... For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.

The voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loud and clear: It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.

It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.

It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages fourteen to forty-four is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.

It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.

It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights ... and women's rights are human rights, once and for all.

-- from Hillary Rodham Clinton's speech at
the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women,
September 1995, Beijing, China,
"Living History," by Hillary Rodham Clinton