“Jesus discouraged the accumulation of wealth, worried about its effects on those who had it, and took special pleasure in helping the poor, dedicating his efforts to them. He must have shaken his head at the large gaps between rich and poor throughout ancient Palestine in the first century.”

American writer and academic

Jay Parini is an American writer and academic, known for fiction, poetry, biography, and criticism. He has published 96 quotes on the site. His work includes novels centered on Leo Tolstoy, Walter Benjamin, Paul the Apostle, and Herman Melville, along with a novelized memoir about a road trip with Jorge Luis Borges. Across these books, he often works at the border between literary history and imagined life, drawing on figures from the canon and the idea of the writer as subject.