Jim Wallis

Jim Wallis
Jim Wallisis a Christian writer and political activist. He is best known as the founder and editor of Sojourners magazine and as the founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Christian community of the same name. Wallis is well known for his advocacy on issues of peace and social justice. Although Wallis actively eschews political labels, he describes himself as an evangelical and is often associated with the evangelical left and the wider Christian left. He works as a spiritual advisor to...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth4 June 1948
CountryUnited States of America
We have got some mountains to move. Three billion people - half of God's children - are living on less than $2 a day.
Trade is now clearly designed to favor the wealthiest and most powerful corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The three wealthiest people on earth now control more assets than the combined incomes of 600 million people in the world's 48 poorest countries.
If you are asking the wrong question, it doesn't matter how good the answer is, you aren't going to get where you want to go.
The disciplines of prayer, silence, and contemplation as practiced by the monastics and mystics are precisely that - stopping the noise, slowing down, and becoming still so that God can break through all our activity and noise to speak to us. Prayer serves to put all parts of our lives in God's presence, reminding us how holy our humanity really is.
What is my calling? What am I supposed to do? I think running for office, public office, can be a divine calling. I mean, Ive wrestled with that very question myself.
Healthcare should be a human right and not a commodity for sale.
A billion dollars every week for Iraq, $87 billion for Iraq. We can't get $5 billion for childcare over five years in welfare reform.
Some people believe the alternative to bad religion is secularism, but that's wrong . . . . The answer to bad religion is better religion--prophetic rather than partisan, broad and deep instead of narrow, and based on values as opposed to ideology.
Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster.
Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change.
Faith can cut in so many ways. If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness - that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self criticism aside. There's no reflection.
Our choice is between cynicism and hope.
I think it's a good thing for a president or political leaders to want to put their values or their faith into action. Desmond Tutu did that in South Africa. Martin Luther King Jr. did that here. This is a good thing.
Hope unbelieved is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed.