An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Everywhere you look, there is a charity or a project in school to get involved in. In eighth grade, there was this program called CJSF, California Junior Scholarship Foundation. We were involved in soup kitchens and toy drives, and your school can set up something like that. If your school doesn't have a program like that, set one up.
Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
Tomorrow, I'm going to a soup kitchen in Mobile. I think that will symbolize the insensitivity of this administration to human needs.
You don’t give someone notes on their performance at a soup kitchen.
It's a Cyprus of misery and soup kitchens and a state which cannot meet basic obligations. It can only cause me grief.
Somebody goes to a soup kitchen and serves the hungry, someone goes to a prison and tries to get people to turn their lives around - those are all Christian charities. This is just another charity the way I look at it. I don't look at it as being special or different.
Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'
And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money...and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a Big Brother or Sister...You want to do well, but if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.
Some of us seem to be born with a drive to try to make the world kinder. In my twenties, living in New York City, I worked in a soup kitchen every Sunday for many years, just trying to do my part. Then I read Animal Liberation and learned about factory farming and the killing of animals for oven cleaner and realized nobody needed my help as badly as the animals did.
You can't deny that religion has done some good. It organizes lots of anti-poverty programs and soup kitchens and missionary work. But I would say that, first of all, all those things can be accomplished without religion. You can be ethical, somebody who does the right thing without feeling that he has to in order to get his ass saved in the next life.
It’s all too easy to turn the fight of faith into sanctification-by-checklist. Take care of a few bad habits, develop a couple good ones, and you’re set. But a moral checklist doesn’t take into consideration the idols of the hearts. It may not even have the gospel as part of the equation. And inevitably, checklist spirituality is highly selective. So you end up feeling successful at sanctification because you stayed away from drugs, lost weight, served at the soup kitchen, and renounced Styrofoam. But you’ve ignored gentleness, humility, joy, and sexual purity.
The capitalist has this over the politician and the clergyman; he has in practice done more to raise the standard of living of the poor than all the government and church programs in history....Monsanto and the Archer Daniels Midland Company have fed more hungry people than all the...soup kitchens combined.
Martin Luther King challenged the conscience of my generation, and his words and his legacy continue to move generations to action today at home and around the world. His love and faith is alive in millions of Americans who volunteer each day in soup kitchens or in schools, or who refused to ignore the suffering of millions they'd never met in far-away places when a tsunami brought unthinkable destruction. His vision and his passion is alive in churches and on campuses when millions stand up against the injustice of discrimination anywhere, or the indifference that leaves too many behind.
Getting your letters or pictures digitized. I don't think it's that important. The more you spend on your materials, you're given the sense that those things are more important due to the total amount spent. You'd probably be better off giving that money to a soup kitchen.
What is the soup kitchen?
There is a new face to hunger today. Many of the people who come to food pantries and soup kitchens are people who never thought they would need help - people who were once part of the middle class and are now unemployed or underemployed - people who are struggling to get by from day to day and week to week.
What's a soup kitchen?
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