“… it is always radical, in any society, to insist on the equal worth of all human beings, and people find all sorts of ways to avoid the claim of that ideal, much though they may pay it lip service. … We should defend this radical agenda as the only one worthy of our conception of democracy and worthy of guiding its future.”
– Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, p. 112 (end of chapter 3). (Before getting to this passage, I said something very similar in the live version of my sermon “The Message of Jesus for Nonsupernaturalists.”)