If our awareness of differences and our commitment to competition is at the heart of our relating, we are blind to each other's experience and world of meanings. Comassion has no home in such relating, for compassion is born of the knowledge that we are made of the same clay, that we hold our humanness as a common gift for whose co-creation we are mutually responsible. We do not cling to any sense of superiority, but become as all people are....[pg. 110]

Compassion is not a matter of skill. It is a matter of passionate risk-taking. Unless we understand this, we cannot hope even to begin to know what hunger and thirst after justice is all about, and we thus take refuge in righteous-sounding words about justice, rather than "justice-ing." [pg.111]

---from Poets, Prophets and Pragmatists: A New Challenge to Religious Life
by Evelyn Woodward