I picked up a copy of Sharon Welch’s After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace at GA, and I’m slowly working my way through it. From page five:

What I know in my soul I learned from the lives of my mother and father: that it is possible to work for justice without self-righteous condemnation of others, acting instead with good-humored resilience in the face of defeat and with a deep joy and zest for life. Where they saw injustice, they responded and invited others to act with them. They did not waste time denouncing others’ apathy or indifference. The range of activities they embraced was vast but united by a common theme: doing something now, with the resources at hand, to make a difference in people’s lives.

From page eighteen:

There is nothing that inevitably and irrevocably grounds our desire for justice. Justice, in all its forms, is our work, our creation, our unfinished task.

And from page seventy:

Here the focus [of social action] is not on critique but on gratitude. The basis for our work for justice and peace can be love for the world, awe and respect for the wonder that surrounds us. This stance is sharply different from that of the prophetic outsider, who bases his or her political work on denunciation and critique… [S]uch continual denunciation poisons our relations to the world around us… Focusing on injustice to the exclusion of other forms of attention prevents us from seeing and receiving all that is healing and isolates us from “all our relations,” human, animal, and nature.