Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy.

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

Think of the question of mass incarceration. Think of the coding that the Republican Party has used for years, whether they're talking about Obama or blacks or Willie Horton.

Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.

Under neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique.

Unlike Western parents, reminding my child of Lord Voldemort didn't bother me.

In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation, and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the original.

The sale begins when the customer says yes.

Whenever a woman describes herself as a 'post-feminist' I picture women lashed to posts. Joan of Arc was an early post-feminist.

If God is in a life, it doesn't have to be big to be happy and to be important in His kingdom.

It is the crucifixion that distinguishes the new message from the mythologies of all other peoples.

I didn't like children. I didn't think of myself as a child. I didn't like any of the things other children were interested in.

In the silence of the Cross, the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue and peace is spoken.

...I am not attacking any particular God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, whenever or wherever they have been or will be invented.

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.