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Category: Politics of Scripture

The Politics of Scripture series follows the Revised Common Lectionary to connect the biblical text to political issues in ancient and contemporary thought and practice. You can search past archives by scriptural book here. We welcome contributions from scholars, religious leaders, and activists. Contact the series editors, Haley Gabrielle and Anna Bowden at [email protected].

The Stories We Tell At The End of The World

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 Moral Vision

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.

Discipleship as Resistance: Disrupting the Traditional Family System

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.

Eating with the Margins: The Political Theology of Table Fellowship

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.

Missing the Message?: How to Resist, not Recapitulate

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 the Great Disruptor of Social Imagination

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.

Promises Made, Promises (Actually) Kept

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.

Big Beautiful Barns

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.

Challenging the Presumption of Divine Favor

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.

The Politics of God’s Sanctuary

God’s sanctuary as a tent and God’s residence in a tent suggest that God is a sojourning God who accompanies people, offering an encampment with and among the communities on their journeys of life.

Two Deadly Sins: The Spiritualization of Poverty and the Patronization of the Needy

The lectionary texts for this week call us to recognize and pursue a spirituality that is holistic; a spirituality that cares for the needs of the poor; a spirituality that takes the side of the needy against the powerful; a spirituality that entails a revolution of the heart; and a spirituality that takes the question of neighbourliness seriously. Such a spirituality would put us on the path of revolutionary neighbourliness.

Allegory or Autobiography?

Sometimes the most I can be grateful for is that it is still possible to imagine an alternative.