Martin Luther King Jr, the “Arc of the Moral Universe,” and Maintaining Faith in Difficult Times

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

When I thought I would write about Martin Luther King, Jr., that was the first quote that came to mind. Apparently King used this line more than once — a brief Google search reveals he said this in an essay he wrote in 1958, and in a Baccalaureate sermon he preached in 1964. But in the essay, he puts the line in quotation marks, showing that he did not consider this his original thought; indeed, it comes form the ideas of...