A Quote by Sonia Johnson

The church belongs to its hierarchy, which is men in power. Those outside the hierarchy, and especially women, are at best only renters and at worst squatters in religious territory.
Women are networkers, women hate hierarchy and especially entrepreneurs hate hierarchy because when they see hierarchy structured in they see rules and regulations are commonplace, and they want to tear it down.
Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.
Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.
In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.
Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.
The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.
Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.
What I think we can do is help individuals understand the church teaching, but also maybe help the church understand the viewpoint of lay men and women about what they want in regard to priests, or how do they want the hierarchy to deal with them?
It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject.
In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
Science, in its ultimate ideal, consists of a set of propositions arranged in a hierarchy, the lowest level of the hierarchy being concerned with particular facts, and the highest with some general law, governing everything in the universe. The various levels in the hierarchy have a two-fold logical connection, travelling one up, one down; the upward connection proceeds by induction, the downward by deduction.
...the aim of every hierarchy is always to imitate God so as to take on His form... the task of every hierarchy is to receive and to pass on undiluted purification, the divine light, and the understanding which brings perfection.
Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'
There should be no boundaries, no hierarchy, no violence. Men and women are equal.
For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, "The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does."
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