Stephan Eichert

“In a city famed for its wealth, Paul proclaimed that it was the ‘low and despised in the world, mere nothings’,34 who ranked first. Among a people who had always celebrated the agon, the contest to be the best, he announced that God had chosen the foolish to shame the wise, and the weak to shame the strong. In a world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were of no more account than those between Greek and Jew.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

“One night when I had convinced her to take yet another respite, I pointed up at the stars as we crossed the quad. “Do you see that?” I said. “That’s the Big Dipper.” Putting my arm around her to direct her vision, I added, “And that over there is Orion.” She glanced up in the sky and then back at me and said, with mock outrage, “No, it’s not. Orion is not visible this time of year.” “Well,” I replied, laughing, “I was only half paying attention in astronomy class.”
― Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South

“Our minds are small because they are faithless,' I said to myself.
'If we had faith in God our hearts would share in His greatness and
peace for we should not then be shut up in ourselves, but would walk
abroad in him”
― George MacDonald, Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood

“When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’17 Even in the Indies, though, there were Spaniards who worried whether this was truly so. ‘Tell me,’ a Dominican demanded of his fellow settlers, eight years before Cortés took the road to Tenochtitlan, ‘by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully in their own land?’18 Most of the friar’s congregation, too angered to reflect on his questions, contented themselves with issuing voluble complaints to the local governor, and agitating for his removal; but there were some colonists who did find their consciences pricked. Increasingly, adventurers in the New World had to reckon with condemnation of their exploits as cruelty, oppression, greed.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World