Joan Chittister

From Where I Stand: COVID-19 lockdowns didn't deprive us of anything in the realm of faith. Instead, they are simply requiring us to dig deeper for spirituality ourselves — which is what we have always been meant to do.

From Where I Stand: Lent is not about giving up our adult candy or immersing ourselves in pain. Lent is about being honest with ourselves, changing what needs to change in our lives, making our world a better place and growing into the Light.

From Where I Stand: We are clearly a people in transition. But going from what to what? Abba Pambo, a Coptic desert monastic of the fourth century preached, "If you have a heart, you can be saved," and his words offer us wisdom now.

From Where I Stand: If you want to resolve a problem, you must be willing to face it, to address it consciously, to confront it. We must stand up to the wind that's shaking the pillars of our republic.

From Where I Stand: It is not the force of power, or the power of force, that can save us. Only inclusiveness and equality everywhere — not party bosses or class conformism — can really save us.

From Where I Stand: Rule making or rule breaking? Each of these has its place. The moral response requires that we decide which is most life-giving at any given time.

From Where I Stand: My mother insisted that there was something to be learned in everything. I've learned a lot from President Donald Trump in none of the ways I wanted to.

From Where I Stand: The time is now. Otherwise, it will forever be too late to grasp this moment of holy change again. It will be far too late to take on the pride, greed and corruption that has brought us to this time.

From Where I Stand: There are some things worth weeping about lest we lose our sense of self. We must always cope with evil, of course, but we must never adjust to it. We must stay eternally restless.

From Where I Stand: Where other countries have made a distinction between pathological individualism and the common good, we are still burying our dead, closing our schools, straining our hospitals and destroying our economy.

From Where I Stand: Since honesty as a prerequisite of character has apparently ceased to be an issue for the electorate at large, have we, as a moral nation, already collapsed? Do we have only lies to live by?

From Where I Stand: Accountability, example, equality, adaptation, care and a personal sense of responsibility direct the leader's leadership style. They're not the values taught in business schools maybe. But they make human beings of us all.

From Where I Stand: Two pandemics have struck at once: one physical, one political, but we have managed to braid the two.

From Where I Stand: The conquest and enslavement of whole peoples is a seedbed of white shame that has lasted for decades, for centuries, and must finally be weeded out now. 

From Where I Stand: We had nothing to do with this racism thing, we say, and we're not going to apologize for something that happened centuries ago. But it's in our DNA. It's what we do. Generation after generation.

From Where I Stand: When you break down anything into its smallest parts, like political news, you break off a piece of the civic culture with it. Until eventually, you don't have a culture.

From Where I Stand: We have lost a taste for solid gold leadership and accepted the gold-plated lookalike. We have bought into the emptiness of soul that takes a nation into the clutches of political subservience.

From Where I Stand: The question is what kind of basic truths — principles — must drive us if we are to endure and survive the kind of despair that threatens a national moment like this one?

From Where I Stand: Honesty, verity, authenticity and factuality are the underpinnings of good, effective government. But facts alone are not its gold standard.

From Where I Stand: Moderation won't do it. What we need now is Christian extremism, the idea that there are some things that cannot be tolerated in life, that there is something we can do to resolve these logjams if we really want to do it.