Quotes
“Institutional sins are often the hardest to repent of, because they require later-arrived institutional actors to make themselves accountable for their predecessors’ errors.” – the brief of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Consider Nehemiah’s response to the sins of his forebears in the first chapter of the book of Nehemiah. “Even I and my father’s house have sinned.” He bore culpability even though the sin for which God’s people were carried off to Babylon took place before Nehemiah was born.”)
“…when we slide into institutional roles, we inherit institutional responsibilities, even if we’re individually innocent of prior institutional misconduct.” – David French, “The Third Rail” (an email newsletter), The Atlantic, 16 December 2021. (This was part of David’s response to the quote above from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.)
“Behind King’s conception of the Beloved Community lay his assertion that human existence is social in nature. ‘The solidarity of the human family’ is a phrase he frequently used to express the idea. ‘We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,’ he said in one of his addresses. This was a way of affirming that reality is made up of structures that form an interrelated whole; in other words, that human beings are dependent upon each other. Whatever a person is or possesses he owed to others who have preceded him. As King wrote, ‘Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally “in the red.”‘ Recognition of one’s indebtedness to past generations should inhibit the sense of self-sufficiency and promote awareness that personal growth cannot take place apart from meaningful relationship with other persons, that the ‘I’ cannot attain fulfillment without the ‘thou.'” – Kenneth L. Smith and Ira Zepp quoting MLK as found in Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s book, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It. Pages 41-42.
“Hate destroys, but love revitalizes.” – Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It. Page 42
“You didn’t know you came to make a city.“
These words from Colorado poet Thomas Hornsby Ferrill are carved in stone in the atrium of Denver’s Wellington E. Webb Municipal Building. They capture an essential insight: through our interactions with neighbors, the ways we enjoy our parks and public spaces, the policies we advocate and vote for, and the problems we turn a blind eye to, we create the community we call home.
This insight animates our look at Colorado’s capital city in Building Denver. The exhibition, which closes September 6, presents Denver’s history through the buildings and iconic spaces that define the city and embody a record of its residents’ shared hopes, ideas, and aspirations. All along the way, the exhibition invites us to consider how we can get involved to build the city we want. Because as an earlier poet (and sometime playwright) named William Shakespeare said: “What is a city but the people?”
This month we’re taking up the exhibition’s invitation so compellingly captured in Mayor Federico Peña’s call to “Imagine a Great City.” On August 18 at 7 pm at the History Colorado Center, we hope you will join us for a very special evening with Denver’s mayors from the past four decades—Federico Peña, Wellington Webb, John Hickenlooper, and Michael Hancock—as they reflect on the city they imagined and what remains to be done. We’ll further explore what remains to be done in Is This the City We Imagined?, a book inspired by the exhibition that collects 14 leading voices as they consider where Denver goes from here. Look for it this summer.
—Jason Hanson, Chief Creative Officer [from a History Colorado eNewsletter sent out on August 2, 2022]
“Adequate political theory, therefore, would include at least three elements:
(1) an orienting doctrine, or a guide to thought, explaining the place of government in the world as a whole;
(2) a practical doctrine, or a guide to action, explaining in broad but practical terms how Christians should conduct themselves in the civic realm; and
(3) a cultural apologetic, or a guide to persuation, explaining how to go about making the specific proposals of those who share the other two elements plausible to those who do not.” – J. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square. (page 19)