you can read the article here or see below for some excerpts that stuck out to me.
"The idea that there's a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. Actually, maybe even far-fetched to start with," Bono said. "But the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in s— and straw and poverty is genius, and brings me to my knees, literally. To me, as a poet, I am just in awe of that. It makes some sort of poetic sense. It's the thing that makes me a believer, though it didn't dawn on me for many years."
"This is the defining moral issue of our time," Bono repeatedly told church congregations during the tour, which was designed to raise people's awareness of the one-two punch of AIDS and profound poverty that is claiming the lives of 6,500 Africans every day.
"This generation will be remembered for three things: the Internet, the war on terror, and how we let an entire continent go up in flames while we stood around with watering cans. Or not," he would say, sometimes pounding his fist for emphasis. "Let me share with you a conviction. God is on his knees to the church on this one. God Almighty is on his knees to us, begging us to turn around the supertanker of indifference on the subject of AIDS."
"There's nothing worse than a rock star with a cause," he said, as actors Ashley Judd and Chris Tucker, fellow speakers on the Heart of America Tour, stood by. "But celebrity is currency and we want to spend it this way. … It's preposterous and absurd that you have to listen to it from us. But that's how the news media works."
"I think our whole idea of who we are is at stake. I think Judeo-Christian culture is at stake," he said. "If the church doesn't respond to this, the church will be made irrelevant. It will look like the way you heard stories about people watching Jews being put on the trains. We will be that generation that watched our African brothers and sisters being put on trains."
"There should be civil disobedience on this. You read about the apostles being persecuted because they were out there taking on the powers that be. Jesus said, 'I came to bring a sword.' In fact, it's a load of sissies running around with their 'bless me' clubs. And there's a war going on between good and evil. And millions of children and millions of lives are being lost to greed, to bureaucracy, and to a church that's been asleep. And it sends me out of my mind with anger.
"This is what's important and why I would be doing this interview with Christianity Today, to implore the church to reconsider grace, to put an end to this hierarchy of sin. … All have fallen short. Let's stop throwing stones at people who've made mistakes in their life, and let's start throwing drugs."
There is little hope for most HIV-infected Africans, Bono told crowds on the Heart of America tour, because they cannot afford the $1 a day for medications that are readily available in the
"People are dying for the stupidest of reasons: money," he said.
"We're not asking for money here," Bono said. "We feel we've already given the money. We're asking you to give the President permission to spend the money on this problem."
"Two and a half million Africans are going to die next year because they can't get ahold of drugs that we take for granted," Bono would say over and over again during the tour. "That's not a cause. That's an emergency."
"If Bono is one of us, then we have to take on the challenge of what he's saying. But if we can ostracize him and say he's not one of us, we don't have to think about the marginalization, we don't have to think about postmodernity, we don't have to think about the challenges he's laid before the church. If this guy is right, then I have to sort out my life," Stockman said.
