Single cases of unhappiness are inevitable in our frail human life; but when there are millions of them, all running along well-defined grooves, reducible to certain laws, then this misery is not individual, but a social matter, due to causes in the structure of our society and curable only by social reconstruction.
-- Walter Rauchenbusch
Look up when Rouchenbusch lived AND the context about which he was speaking.
The psalms remind us that the way we judge each other, with harsh words and acts of vengeance, constitutes injustice, and they remind us that it is the powerless in society who are overwhelmed when injustice becomes institutionalized. . . .
In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the psalms act as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first.
-- Kathleen Norris
