“When the cause is just, nothing other than the inflated rhetoric of the prophets, it seems, can shock us out of our complacency and shove before our eyes in all their starkness the alternatives we need to face. It forces us to confront them and to take a stand one way or the other, no wiggle. It also offers hope when the cause seems hopeless and when all the calculation has come to naught. It galvanizes us to action against seemingly insuperable odds because the prophets who wield their rhetoric have a dream that conveys them and us to places where we otherwise would never have the courage to go.”
—John W. O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), pp. 74f.
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