Hasta La Gadget!

Growing up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a famously once-segregated community, with a black stepfather meant that from an early age, I understood one thing for certain: racism was still alive and well. Now as CEO of an online lending startup, I see that one behemoth industry has been at the epicenter of this massive scale of discrimination for its entire existence. Mortgage lending has caused injustice to minorities from its beginning and the answer to creating greater access to equality may lie in technology.

In the middle-class Philadelphia suburb of my childhood, every house was the same, in fact they were absolutely intended to be and appear identical, a testament to its developer, William Levitt, being credited with the title of “The Henry Ford of Housing.” But the residents were anything but identical — a veritable broadest-range gene pool made up of third and fourth-generation immigrant families. Germans, Irish, Turks, Dutch, Italians. People of every stripe called this their home, but these varieties were only varying by a shade or two of whiteness.

Our family was decidedly different. When my mother remarried in 1989, it was to a wonderful man I was lucky to call my stepfather. He also happened to be black. He raised my younger brother and me as his own children. My mom and stepdad gave birth to my third brother while living in Levittown, so we were a mixed-race family, a fact not lost on the history of our now-integrated, but still unhealed town.

In 1952, just thirty seven years before my family lived there, the first homes in William Levitt’s suburbia were sold and applications for homeownership were made in person at the Levittown Exhibit Center Sales Office. The Chairman of Levitt & Sons “did not consider himself to hold racist ideals,” yet he long refused to sell homes to African Americans, allowing discrimination in the newly-developed housing community to continue and perpetuating the practices and policies of red-lining common in urban centers. And he justified this blatant racism as being nothing more than a byproduct of the era, stating that he “knew that if we sold one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community.” While Levitt structured mass suburbia for the first time, he certainly was not the first or the last to structure a historic, systematic approach that excluded black people from reasonable housing options.

This attitude was not isolated and certainly permeated the nation. It’s curious to consider the context of history. When Levitt was breaking ground on his mega-development, Jackie Robinson was breaking the color barrier in baseball and the following year, President Harry S. Truman integrated the military. Levitt’s neighborhood, innovative as it was, was simultaneously behind the times from the moment of its inception, to say the least, and this brought certain controversy just five years later.

Imagine the community in 1957. Mobs of angry, white protestors are held back by State Police at 43 Deepgreen Lane, in the Dogwood Hollow section of Levittown, PA. There’s been two steady weeks of rioting. Windows are smashed. The national anthem rings out from voices of the “most patriotic” neighbors. Home deliveries of milk, oil, and bread halt. Threats of being “shot down on sight,” swirl through the families’ telephones. Later, anti-segregationists purchase the property next door and fly the confederate flag, furthering their intimidation tactics. But Daisy Myers and her family stay, one of the first to take on Levittown’s segregation rules, weathering this ordeal with “dignity, courage, grace, and fortitude.” This earns her the well-deserved title of the “Rosa Parks of the North.”

It is predictable, now reviewing the historical facts, that the effects of segregation are still seen in Levittown today, as the 2010 census identified ninety-eight percent of the town’s population as Caucasian. Racist policies here and in most of the country have not abated – they’ve simply evolved, and they reveal themselves oftentimes too late.

As a case in point, my parents just received a check for $235 in the mail for discriminatory action against them during their last refinance. Between 2005 and 2008, National City Bank “engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination on the basis of race and national origin in residential mortgage lending in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Fair Housing Act policies and practices,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The settlement states that “African-American and Hispanic borrowers paid higher prices for their home mortgage loans than non-Hispanic White borrowers, not based on creditworthiness or other objective criteria related to borrower risk, but because of their race or national origin.” Approximately 76,000 African-American and Hispanic residential mortgage borrowers were affected. In order to fully grasp the impact of this amount, one needs to consider the compounded impact of that kind of practice — dollar by dollar, the accrual over time of the unfair and uneven practices.

It’s obvious, then, to see why the myth of post-racial America is so deeply offensive and how our current mortgage industry is perpetuating this lie. For example, when buying or refinancing a home, a borrower must sign a minimum of 28 pages of disclosures, with variances depending on his or her state, the loan and property types, as well as lender-specific requirements.

Reading through the legalese of these 28-plus pages, one will see many passages that speak directly or indirectly to discriminatory practices. In fact, only 10 of these pages actually are needed to process the loan. The rest, of course, exist to protect the proverbial asses of the banks whose faulty policies led to their very creation. On close inspection, one will see that these documents say what should already be apparent — that you will not be discriminated against upon your race, religion, sex and sexual orientation. This is no less a byproduct of reactionary regulations via added paperwork and is akin to treating the symptom instead of the cause. It’s ludicrous that an additional 18 pages of documentation must be dedicated to telling borrowers about basic human rights, all in the name of compliance — especially when it’s evident that unfair lending practices are still prevalent.

What’s more, in a survey completed at the 2014 Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention, over 80 percent of bankers that responded suggested that their cost to manage compliance will rise in 2015. That means higher fees and likely more paperwork are on the way. To believe that these reactionary policies and the documents that represent them can fix the human element at play is shortsighted.

The truth is that homeownership is one of the primary tools for accumulating wealth. It is a critical step in gaining access to desirable communities in which one can enjoy ample public services, including public schools. In a related issue, one could look long and hard at our funding for public education as derived from real estate property taxes — the intersectionality here is potent. For a long time, homeownership was a luxury enjoyed by only a small portion of the population. Due to the enormous costs associated with this, only 30 percent of Americans owned their homes in 1930. This all changed in 1934 when Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. This insured private mortgages, allowing interest rates to fall and buyers to make smaller down payments.

Theoretically, this should have opened the door for all people to embrace the dream of owning a home. However, in implementing the new law, the FHA adopted a map system that rated neighborhoods according to their apparent stability. In hindsight, what stability meant was race. Neighborhoods without minorities were awarded “A” or “on demand” scores, while immigrant and minority neighborhoods routinely were graded “D.” The practical effect of this was that minorities were unable to secure financing to purchase houses in their neighborhoods.

This practice known as “redlining” meant that for decades minorities struggled to purchase homes, usually against an unseen, unnamed opponent, the lending institutions themselves. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act outlawed this overtly racist lending behavior, but it continued nearly unabated for years. Finally, in 1975, Congress gave teeth to the law: the Mortgage Disclosure Act required financial institutions to collect and report data regarding their lending practices to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. Banks had to submit information about exactly who applied for financing and what decisions were made.

While this was arguably one of the most important steps in curtailing discriminatory lending practices, it would be decades before anyone made heads or tails of the data as it required long-term examinations of the systemic practices of the institutions over the course of hundreds of applications. In over 20 studies conducted between 1980 and 1991, with all other factors being equal, researchers found a negative correlation between the racial composition of an area and the lending decision, meaning if you were a minority, you were less likely to be approved for a loan. So much for outlawing racial lending behavior.

With the data behind them, the Department of Justice finally stepped in to put a stop to discriminatory lending practices. In a landmark case, U.S. v. Decatur Federal Savings and Loan Association (1996), the DOJ charged Decatur with a pattern of racial discrimination in lending. Among its charges, the DOJ specifically alleged that the bank marketed its loans primarily to white customers, failed to offer desirable loan products to black customers, and, most damning, denied financing to black applicants with identical qualifications as white applicants. In response to the suit, Decatur agreed to take remedial measures to address its racial profiling and pay $1 million in reparations. A slap on the wrist, as they say. And what’s more, these payments did not compensate for accrued wealth that comes with equity and tax benefits of homeownership, widening the wealth gap further.

This should have been the end of it. However, the next decade ushered in some of the ugliest discriminatory practices to date. Instead of barring People of Color from securing financing, lending institutions, in a complete role-reversal, began to seek out these applicants. In a process known as reverse-redlining, banks targeted minorities for mortgage applications, specifically steering them toward subprime mortgages with high interest rates and unfavorable terms.

This predatory lending was not limited to minorities with low credit scores. In fact, even when minority applicants had good credit, they were pushed to subprime loans. A 2009 study by the New York Times showed that black households in New York City with an income of $68,000 or more were nearly five times more likely to hold subprime mortgages than white households with similar or even lower incomes. Black applicants who qualified for prime mortgages were 2.9 more likely to be talked into a subprime loan and Hispanic borrowers were 1.8 times more likely. Is this because these groups are more receptive? Easier to sell? Not likely. But what does remain an indisputable fact, is that subprime loans paid more commission to the loan officers on the other end of the telephone. A moral hazard was at the epicenter of the problem.

At institutions, such as National City Bank, financial incentives were created to compensate loan officers who charged “overages,” or additional fees above the par rate. This par rate is the price of a mortgage loan, which is calculated entirely on criteria related to loan risk and is usually set forth on a rate sheet. Industry wide, it was not uncommon for employees to be awarded higher commissions or bonuses for coaxing borrowers to accept subprime loans when they would have otherwise qualified for prime loans.

Internal memos and affidavits later revealed that bank employees referred to subprime applicants as “mud people” and their financing as “ghetto loans.” In 2006, 52 percent of loans to blacks and 40 percent of loans to Hispanics were subprime. This is a quintessential example of institutionalized, systemic, race-based crime that is profit-driven and continues in the twenty-first century.

Ultimately, these financial institutions were held accountable for their discriminatory lending. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the United States Department of Justice have entered into a settlement with the aforementioned National City Bank, which established a $35 million fund to pay African-American and Hispanic borrowers identified by the government agencies as having overpaid. Wells Fargo has ponied up $175 million to settle a suit for lending discrimination and Bank of America has paid $335 million to resolve a similar suit.

These numbers, staggering as they are, do not actually represent a fair or accurate compensation. The damage was done. Borrowers with subprime mortgages defaulted at historic rates and many lost their homes to foreclosure. And due to the predatory lending practices of large banks, minorities were hit hardest.

A study done by the Center for Responsible Lending found disparate foreclosure rates between white, black and Hispanic communities. According to the study, 4.5 percent of white homeowners foreclosed on their homes compared to 7.9 percent of Hispanic homeowners and 7.7 percent of black homeowners during the mortgage crisis. What’s interesting is that the study showed that high-income black borrowers were 80 percent more likely, and Latinos 90 percent more likely, to lose their homes to foreclosure than their white counterparts, pointing to disproportionate numbers of minority borrowers who were directed into subprime loans.

The effects of the subprime mortgage crisis will be felt for a long time by the United States. However, for minorities, it served as just another black eye in the pursuit of owning a home. Since 1940, the gap in homeownership between whites and minorities has been at least 20 percent. Today, it’s even larger. Almost 73 percent of whites own their home compared to only 42.9 percent of blacks and 45.6 percent of Hispanics. For minorities, the ability to take that simple step toward financial independence and wealth accumulation remains as elusive as it was in 1930.

Finally, this practice is changing. And not too surprisingly, it’s not the banks, the perpetrators of mass-discrimination and historically misleading practices that are leading the charge. In fact, it’s a handful of technology companies from Silicon Valley. You see, to take a step in the right direction, we need to remove race from the equation, not regulate it with checkboxes and reactionary policies. The practice of applying for a loan online may level the playing field and be less worrisome for People of Color, but there are still challenges and ultimately, it’s still mostly white people making the underwriting decisions.

Changing the way one applies for a loan doesn’t simply mean stating for 28 pages that a borrower will not be discriminated against, or that we should depend solely on federal and state regulations to curb financial intuitions’ racist lending practices. Decades of systemic discrimination have proven that model unsuccessful. However, by allowing all people to apply for loans behind the safety of a computer screen, the benefits are tremendous.

Imagine a homeowner looking to refinance their home. They open their computer and visit a website that shops all available rates in three seconds. The site only delivers the best rates for their scenario and is not incentivized by selling overages. The borrower then fills out the application, and their credit is pulled to verify their identity. They e-sign some processing disclosures, and login to bank accounts to provide income and asset verification. This entire scenario takes only 30 minutes of the borrower’s time.

On the other side of that transaction sits an underwriter who has not seen a single checkbox for race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. The loan is approved and the homeowner instantly receives a congratulatory email or text message. But the benefits of that scenario lie deeper than this good news.

In this situation, the need for non-process related disclosures goes to nil. Consequently, operational costs plummet and consumers save personal time, amounting to lower rates and fees paid for the loan.

Additionally, this aforementioned process is convenient for everyone. No matter the borrower’s proximity to the local bank or their availability during typical banking hours, all resources are accessible virtually, 24/7.

Lastly and most importantly, borrowers can finally be assessed fairly, not by the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, their religion, or their gender, but solely on the content of their application.

Equality, at least in terms of lending, may be closer than we think.

Jason van den Brand is founder and CEO of Lenda, the first platform that helps home owners get a refinance online from start to finish. Based in San Francisco, Lenda graduated 500 Startups in summer 2014 and secured funding from prominent VC’s including Tom Fallows of Google Shopping Express, Structure Capital, Winklevoss Capital and China Growth Capital.

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – “The O’Reilly Factor” has long been the most popular program in cable news, and the controversy surrounding host Bill O’Reilly’s war-reporting experiences has only helped elevate the show’s ratings.

Wednesday night’s “Factor” delivered easily the program’s largest audience of 2015 in the key news demo of adults 25-54 (705,000) — up 24% week-to-week, up 62% year-over-year and more than four times the audience of cable news runner-up “Anderson Cooper” on CNN (162,000).

It also dominated in total viewers, moving back past the 3 million mark (3.084 million) while its MSNBC (907,000) and CNN (535,000) competition drew about half as much combined. MSNBC was above average in total viewers with its exclusive town hall meeting with President Obama, but it wasn’t even close.

O’Reilly didn’t address the Mother Jones story on his Falkland War reporting from 1982 during Wednesday’s show, but it’s likely that he’s getting a bump from the controversy’s aftermath.

Since last week, reports have emerged challenging O’Reilly’s past assertions about his experiences in El Salvador, whether or not he witnessed the suicide of a man tied to Lee Harvey Oswald and most recently, whether he came under attack while covering the 1992 Los Angeles riots for the syndicated newsmagazine series “Inside Edition.”

Fox News execs have staunchly backed their star host, slamming on Thursday what the network called “the unproven accusation du jour.”

As media observers have noted, the deluge of reports questioning O’Reilly’s past reportage is likely to only rally his core audience to the show. Monday’s episode of “O’Reilly Factor,” in which O’Reilly defended himself by broadcasting excerpts of CBS News coverage of the protests he was covering in 1982, drew the largest overall “Factor” audience (3.34 million) since November.

On Sunday John Legend and Common, the writers and performers of the song “Glory” from the motion picture Selma, accepted the Oscar for Best Original Song after performing the song in front of a screen displaying some of the dramatic moments from the movie. Their performance and acceptance speech reignited widespread discussion in the media about the current state of civil rights, voting rights, and racial justice in our nation. But the relationship between African-American communities and police following killings of unarmed African Americans by police in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and other places remains a controversial subject in many households and community organizations and on college campuses across the nation.

Against this backdrop I was pleased to participate in “Speak Out & Listen In,” a recent teach-in at the University of San Francisco. Taking a page from the teach-ins held on several college campuses during the ’60s and ’70s to address the U.S. military intervention in the Vietnam War, USF faculty and students took on topics like “Race, Violence & Power,” “Understanding White Privilege,” and “Strengthening Our Voices through Awareness, Knowledge and Skills to Create Action” and attended a panel discussion with San Francisco community leaders and the chief of police.

Professor James W. Loewen, in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, writes, “Perhaps the most pervasive theme in our history is the domination of black America by white America. Race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life.” Indeed, the current allegations of police brutality against African Americans, especially black men, have deep historical roots. However, as I and others have written and spoken about ad nauseam, there appears to be a deeply rooted reticence among most white Americans to discuss race, race relations, and racism in this country. Race issues are the elephant in the room in most white households, whose members would like to avoid admitting, let alone confronting, the 24/7 presence of race issues in their daily lives. But teach-ins like “Speak Out & Listen In” can, as occurred at USF, publicly address and foster discussion around issues like the impact of the historical institution of slavery and its companion doctrine of white supremacy on how today’s African Americans are perceived by many in federal and local law enforcement.

The police killing of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson prompted concern, even outrage, among not just African Americans but a significant number of whites and others, as demonstrated by the nationwide protests that followed. This fact, more than anything else, probably influenced New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton when, in a recent speech addressing a predominantly African-American crowd during a Black History Month event at the Greater Allen A. M. E. Cathedral of New York, he said that although police have played a crucial role in maintaining civil rights and freedom of speech, “many of the worst parts of black history would have been impossible without police….” He included slavery in that assessment, saying:

Slavery, our country’s original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws and enforced by police, by slave catchers. … Since then, the stories of police and black citizens have intertwined again and again. The unequal nature of that relationship cannot and must not be denied.

Bratton’s remarks follow even more powerful remarks by FBI Director James Comey. I urge everyone reading this blog post to read the full text of Comey’s remarks here — they are nothing less than historic — but below are some selected excerpts:

With the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, the ongoing protests throughout the country, and the assassinations of NYPD Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, we are at a crossroads.

Unfortunately, in places like Ferguson and New York City, and in some communities across this nation, there is a disconnect between police agencies and many citizens–predominantly in communities of color.

[A]ll of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.

One reason we cannot forget our law enforcement legacy is that the people we serve and protect cannot forget it, either.

Next month will bring the 50th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. Today the demands for justice in Ferguson, coupled with the recent speeches by New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton and FBI Director James Comey, are indeed reasons to keep hope alive!

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) voiced support for the right of states to pursue their own marijuana policies on Thursday, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

At the annual gathering of conservative activists and Republican Party leaders, Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked Cruz if he thought Colorado’s legalization of marijuana was a good idea.

“Look, I actually think this is a great embodiment of what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called ‘the laboratories of democracy,'” Cruz replied. “If the citizens of Colorado decide they want to go down that road, that’s their prerogative. I personally don’t agree with it, but that’s their right.”

In the past, the Texas senator and potential White House candidate has said that he’s open to debate on the subject of marijuana.

“I think we can have an intelligent conversation about drug policy and the degree to which it may or may not be achieving the ends we hope it would achieve,” he told Reason last year.

But Cruz has also been a vocal critic of President Barack Obama for allowing recreational marijuana laws to go into effect in Colorado and Washington state without federal intervention.

“The Obama administration’s approach to drug policy is to simply announce that across the country, it is going to stop enforcing certain drug laws,” Cruz told Reason in that same interview. “Now, that may or may not be a good policy, but I would suggest that should concern anyone — it should even concern libertarians who support that policy outcome — because the idea that the president simply says criminal laws that are on the books, we’re going to ignore [them]. That is a very dangerous precedent.”

Earlier this month, Cruz opened up about his past marijuana use. A spokesperson for the senator said that Cruz had smoked marijuana as a teenager, a youthful experimentation that Cruz now characterizes as a “mistake.”

GOP presidential hopefuls have struggled with marijuana legalization. Recently, some have said they support states’ right to decide, even if they don’t exactly support legalization. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who favors legalization of medical but not recreational marijuana, said that he’s against the federal government telling states that “they can’t” legalize. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has called legalization of recreational marijuana a “bad idea,” but a spokesman said that Rubio believes, “of course,” that states can make their own decisions about laws within their borders. And former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said last year that he doesn’t support legalization personally, but that states should be able decide their own marijuana policies.

Despite the programs now in place in Colorado and Washington state — as well as those going into effect in Alaska and Washington, D.C., and those that will soon go into effect in Oregon — the sale, possession, production and distribution of marijuana all remain illegal under federal law. States’ moves to legalize marijuana or soften penalties for possession have only been effective because of Justice Department guidance urging federal prosecutors to refrain from targeting state-legal marijuana operations.

Responding to Cruz’s remarks, Don Murphy, federal policy analyst for the Marijuana Policy Project, said that marijuana prohibition is a failed federal policy and that rolling it back should be on the agenda of “every Republican lawmaker.”

“Marijuana policy reform is, at its heart, a conservative issue,” said Murphy, who formerly served as a Republican state lawmaker in Maryland. “This is a matter of federalism, the 10th Amendment and state autonomy, which are core conservative priorities.”

An excerpt from Between the Dark and the Daylight.

There is a part of the soul that stirs at night, in the dark and soundless times of day, when our defenses are down and our daylight distractions no longer serve to protect us from ourselves. What we suppress in the light emerges clearly in the dusk. It’s then, in the still of life, when we least expect it, that questions emerge from the damp murkiness of our inner underworld. Questions with ringtones that call the soul to alert but do not come with ready resolutions. Questions about life, not about the trivia of dailiness. The kind of questions to which there is no one answer but which, nevertheless, plague us for attention if we are ever to move through the dimness of life’s twists and turns with confidence.

These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.

It is these kinds of questions that beleaguer the soul from one end of life to the other. It is these questions that the great spiritual traditions of every age have always set out to face and tame.

But how does this happen and what does it demand of us if we are to brook the inexorable appearance of these confusions, these tormentors of the spirit, and bend them to the best in us?

The truth is that we spend our lives in the centrifuge of paradox. What seems certainly true on the one hand seems just as false on the other. Life is made up of incongruities: Life ends in death; what brings us joy will surely bring us an equal and equivalent amount of sorrow; perfection is a very imperfect concept; fidelities of every ilk promise support but also often end.

How can we account for these things? How can we deal with them? How can we find as much comfort in them as there is confusion? These are the queries that will not go away but which, the spiritual giants of every age knew, need to be faced if we are ever to rise above the agitation of them. There is a point in life when its paradoxes must be not only considered but laid to rest.

The great truth of early monastic spirituality, for instance, lies in the awareness that only when life is lived in the aura of the transcendent, in the discovery of the Spirit present to us in the commonplaces of life, where the paradoxes lie, can we possibly live life to its fullness, plumb life to its depths.

When seekers went out to the wasteland looking for spiritual direction from the Fathers and Mothers of the desert, they did not receive in response to their spiritual questions harsh exercises in self-denial. On the contrary. They received instruction in self-knowledge. They received the wisdom of those who themselves had fathomed the tumult of life’s paradoxes. They were instructed in the need to confront the tensions of them in their own lives. Not to deny them. Not to try to escape them. Not to ignore them. Not even to judge them. They were required to learn to see in the opposites of life the real richness of life.

Stories abound in the Christian tradition extolling the exploits of great spiritual figures whose fasts were Olympian, their years of solitude monumental, their rigorous disciplines on every level breathtaking. And so?

That kind of spiritual discipline is certainly impressive, but it does not represent the whole story. It is not even the greater part of the stories of any of the great spiritual eras or traditions. Seekers throughout the ages, the great mystics of every century, knew that it is not in physical asceticisms alone, let alone essentially, that the soul grows, expands, centers, and becomes its most radiant self.

In fact, the physical feats of those whose marks of the spiritual life lie in taxing the body and ignoring the world are, at best, more questionable disciplines to the age in which we live now than they are acceptable examples of an inspiring spiritual life. We flee them like the scourge. So what good were they?

If truth were known, that kind of spiritual heroism may well do more to discourage commitment to the spiritual life than to inspire it. So what is the stuff of the universal spiritual quest and path? What can possibly be found from across the ages as spiritual model for the likes of us?

To the average person whose life is exemplary most of all for its ordinariness–to people like you and me, for instance–it is what goes on inside of us that matters for the healthy life and real spirituality.

Clearly, the spiritual life begins within the heart of a person. And when the storms within recede, the world around us will still and stabilize as well. Or to put it another way, it was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms. Whatever it is that we harbor in the soul throughout the nights of our lives is what we will live out during the hours of the day.

This single-minded concentration on the essence and purpose of life, along with a focus on inner quietude and composure, makes for a life lived in white light and deep heat at the very core of the soul. Centering on the spirits within us, rather than being obsessed with the vicissitudes and petty imperfections of life gives the soul its stability, whatever the kinds or degrees of turbulence to be dealt with around it.

It is those elements of spirituality that this book is about, not extreme asceticisms or rejection of the world. Sometimes extolled in early spirituality, they are actually minor themes in the history of spirituality.

Nevertheless, this book has not been written for the sake of recording or repeating the wisdom of the past.

Instead, this book is meant to shine light on the inner confusions of our own age. It is written for all our sakes. For now–for this time and place, where we live our lives at the epicenter of chaos and crises from all directions. We are weary and worn out from its petty problems and daily stress, are in search of the quiet that calms confusion and clarifies insights and firms the path.

It is these paradoxes of our own times that skulk within us, that confuse us, sap our energy, and, in the end, tax our strength for the dailiness of life. They call us to the depth of ourselves. They require us to see Life behind life. Confronting the paradoxes of life around us and in us, contemplating the meaning of them for ourselves, eventually and finally, leads to our giving place to the work of the Spirit in our own lives.

And then will we have answers to it all? Probably not. Johann W. von Goethe wrote once, “Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.” It is thinking through life alone, by ourselves or as communities of seekers with no particular or immediate instance in mind, that may save us from giving ourselves up to the enigmas of life in despair.

For all of us, paradox underlies the question of what it means to be human. These thoughts that rise out of nowhere in us between dark and dawn seem to have no content but will not let us rest. How is it that what is right at some times is not right at all times? What does it take to choose between them? This little book is an excursion into recognizing in the convolutions of this process the stuff of our own life of the spirit.

Excerpted from BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT by Joan Chittister Copyright © 2015 by Joan D. Chittister. Excerpted by permission of Image Books, a division of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.