9. Rules for Radicals
1. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1989), originally published 1971, epigraph page.
2. Ibid., 61.
3. Ibid., 29.
4. Ibid., 36.
5. The Sermon on the Mount is, as the moral theologian Servais Pinckaers put it, “the summit upon which all revealed moral teachings converged.” It contains and fulfills all those teachings’ precepts. The Beatitudes are the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, and they are the key to understanding all of Jesus’ teachings.
6. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Pursuit of Happiness—God’s Way: Living the Beatitudes, translated by Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 16.
7. Ibid., 13.
8. Ibid., 10–17.
9. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 67.
10. Pinckaers, Pursuit of Happiness, 18.
11. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics, translated by Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 144.
12. CCC, no. 1718.
13. The Confessions are, in a sense, two stories woven into one. One is Augustine’s confession of his own sin and inability to find happiness in the things of the world and in pagan wisdom. The other is a confession of praise to God because God has found Augustine and given him that happiness.
14. Augustine, Confessions, I.1.
15. Ibid., X.22–23.
16. CCC, no. 1721.
17. Ibid., no. 1724.
18. Ibid., no. 1820.
19. A common idea in Jesus’ time and in the Old Testament was that in giving to the poor, the rich were lending to God. At the Day of Judgment, they would be repaid when the poor would proclaim their righteousness before God. For more on this idea, see Gary Anderson, Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
20. Pinckaers, Pursuit of Happiness, 40–41.
21. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 77.
22. Ibid., 44–52.
23. Ibid., 80–82.
24. Pinckaers, Pursuit of Happiness, 56–57.
25. Ibid., 61.
26. Ibid., 68.
27. Ibid., 71.
28. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 86–88.
29. Quoted in Pinckaers, Pursuit of Happiness, 76.
30. Ibid., 86–87.
31. Ibid., 94.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 89.
35. Pinckaers, Pursuit of Happiness, 98–99.
36. Ibid., 110.
37. Ibid., 111.
38. Ibid., 117.
39. Ibid., 119.
40. Ibid., 120.
41. Ibid., 124.
42. Ibid., 127–31.
43. Ibid., 156.
44. John L. Allen Jr.’s book The Global War on Christians (New York: Image, 2013) offers a powerful, sobering account of this wave of persecution.
45. Thérèse of Lisieux once wrote: “I felt charity enter into my soul, and the need to forget myself and to please others; since then I’ve been happy!” Robert Barron comments: “I cannot think of a more succinct summary of the Christian way: the divine life, which can come only as a gift, changes us in such a way that we want to live for the other, and this conversion produces joy” (Barron, Priority of Christ, 308).