Luke’s account thus presses towards a re-imagining of community. Belonging is not guaranteed by purity or boundary maintenance but by practices of compassionate recognition.
Does being “without sin” mean never regretting anything, or getting everything right on the first try?
These systemic injustices have a root: the root of a colonial system designed to supplant Indigenous life. They have a genealogy, a history, a process: their ancestor is money and their descendants are death.
We must remember that stories are only alive as they are told and retold, embedding themselves in a society’s soil and growing as people inject energy through letting the story play out in the world.
War and its terrible consequences are painful to look at, but the prophet Jeremiah calls his audience not to look away. Our attention is an essential part of our moral agency.
By subverting familial connections, Jesus is not undermining ties of affection but dismantling the social and economic security that comes with them, while simultaneously expanding the meaning of relationality.
True hospitality is not simply about offering occasional charity or gestures of kindness but about dismantling the structures that prevent full participation in community life. It requires courage to challenge entrenched systems of exclusion and to imagine social bonds not as transactional exchanges but as expressions of shared humanity.
It is a prudent caution not to fall prey to our own confirmation biases when reading Luke’s gospel. In today’s world of political distraction and power plays, Jesus’s central message of love and liberation is as necessary and life-giving as ever before.
Jesus reminds us that his ministry is a disruptive one, one that is intended to allow for an awakening to justice and hospitality towards all.
The democratic experiment of the last few hundred years is itself simply a promise: that a people can make decisions on how to live together.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” proves little more than another big beautiful barn—a grandiose spectacle that obscures the damage inflicted on society’s most vulnerable communities.
Those who presume upon God’s support but act in ways that defy God’s standard will find their presumption turned upside-down in divine disavowal.