When I was just a twenty-something, I came to Newark, and I found a connection to the city in a spiritual way. I found a connection here and people here that reminded me so much of my roots and my own family.
After Yale Law School, I was proud to try to live up to my parents' example and began my career working for The Urban Justice Center in the streets of Newark, organizing residents to fight for better housing conditions.
We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city.
Newark faces real challenges.
I live in Newark. My family lives in Newark. I own a house in Newark.
This November, with the re-election of President Barack Obama, this generation of Americans will ever expand upon the hope, the truth and the promise of America.
I learned about community organizing from my parents. As a child, their stories were so instructive.
Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, full-contact, participatory endeavor.
I've been wrong on everything about Trump; I've been wrong about everything on the Republican side of the ledger. But allow me - with that caveat - to made the prediction that Donald Trump will not be the president of the United States. It just will not happen.
I love seeing on Twitter when someone says I'm gay, and I say, 'So what does it matter if I am? So be it. I hope you are not voting for me because you are making the presumption that I'm straight.'
You can be like a thermometer, just reflecting the world around you. Or you can be a thermostat, one of those people who sets the temperature.
A more courageous empathy is needed in our country to see the struggles of people from factory towns to farm towns to city towns who can't even afford the rent in their cities anymore because costs are going so high.
As I review the great history of our nation, community organizers have been at the center of so many of our great social movements.
This world has a way of trying to homogenize you. Trying to sanitize you. Trying to scrub you of your unique divine genius. This world wants to make you regular.
My faith tradition is love your enemies. It's not complicated for me, if I aspire to be who I say I am. I am a Christian American. Literally written in the ideals of my faith is to love those who hate you. I don't see why that's so shocking.
People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.
Having people that really reflect the spectrum of American experiences is important to have on the Supreme Court.
We have Donald Trump standing up as one of the greatest fear-mongers in this nation's history. He's trying to make us afraid of each other.
I think a lot of folks are beginning to feel that the forces that are tearing us apart in this country are stronger than the forces that tie us together. I don't believe that.
We're not called to be a tolerant nation. We're called to be a nation of love.
