"All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.""But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?""Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.""Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.""I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.""I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.""If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.""It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.""Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.""Now I can go back to being ruthless again.""One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.""Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.""People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.""Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.""The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.""There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?""Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.""Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.""What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.""Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes."
Ordained a priest in Japan in 1965, he studied with Yamada Koun in Japan in the 1970s. He was installed as a Zen teacher of the White Plum Asanga lineage in 1991 and was given the title Roshi in 1997. Kennedy studied Zen with Yamada Roshi in Kamakura, Japan, Maezumi Roshi in Los Angeles and Bernard Glassman Roshi in New York. Glassman Roshi installed Kennedy as sensei in 1991 and conferred Inka (his final seal of approval) in 1997, making him a roshi (master). Kennedy is currently an elder in the Zen Peacemaker Order founded by Glassman in 1996.
Robert Kennedy was for a time chairperson of the theology department of Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, N.J. Currently, he teaches theology and used to teach the Japanese Language. In addition to his work at the college, he is a practicing psychotherapist in New York City, a representative at the United Nations of the Institute for Spiritual Consciousness in Politics and the author of two books, "Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit" and "Zen Gifts to Christians." Kennedy Roshi sits with his Zen students daily at the Morning Star Zendo in Jersey City and with students in other zendos located throughout the tri-state area. He conducts weekend and weeklong sesshins (Zen retreats) at various centers in the United States, Mexico, England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland.
To date, Kennedy Roshi has installed eleven dharma successors: Janet Richardson Roshi, Charles Birx Sensei, Ellen Birx Sensei, Janet Abels Sensei, Ray Cicetti Sensei, Gregory Abels Sensei, Paul Schubert Sensei, Inge von Wobeser-Hopfner Sensei, Patrick Eastman Sensei, Michael Holleran Sensei, and Kevin Hunt Sensei (a Trappist monk from St. Joseph's Abbey at Spencer, Mass.).
