From Dr. King’s last sermon “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” March 31, 1968:

We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
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Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

From Dr. James Perkinson, Professor of Ethics and ​Systematic Theology at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit, MI:

I am very close to arguing — as a kind of hermeneutic strategy of trying to occasion conversion by way of “shock” — that I don’t think it is possible to live in the suburbs (or their commuter-friendly equivalent of gentrified and gated “enclosures” inside the city itself) and be Christian. At least, not to live “peacefully” in the suburbs and try to make sense of being a disciple only on its own terms. If one lives there and regularly raises issue with who is being excluded from there, that is a different story. If one advocates for low-income housing, or homeless shelters, or HIV-treatment centers, and tries to make apparent the way a “suburb” constitutes a kind of simultaneous realization of economic appropriation (of resources from elsewhere) and social exclusion (of people whose class position and racial affiliation make them “suspect”), then that is a serious form of witness. But simply to live in a suburb “neutrally” is merely to participate in — and perpetuate — a quintessential American fiction of innocence. The suburb is not, and has not ever been, a neutral entity. Neither is it innocent.

From Wen Stephenson’s What We’re Fighting For Now Is Each Other (2015):

What I have found, in the stories of those profiled here, and many others, is that the climate struggle, like so many struggles of the past, is essentially a spiritual struggle—it forces us to confront the deepest, most difficult questions about ourselves. The climate catastrophe is so fundamental that it strikes to the root of who we are: it’s a radical situ- ation, and it requires a radical response. But not radical, necessarily, in the conventional sense of ideology. Rather, it confronts us with a kind of radical necessity—a moral necessity. It requires us to wake up—to face the facts, to find out who we really are—and to act. In some cases, to lay everything on the line: our relationships, our reputations, our careers, our bodies, maybe even our lives.