In turning away from more abstract debates about liturgy to those that center on its lived and material dimensions, we hope to enliven a conversation about ‘lived liturgy’ to consider what practices uphold, challenge, or fail to account for the global political order.
We all experience our own wildernesses in our lives… What we do with the experience is what matters. Do we use it as a foundation to be altruistic in how we live our lives, or do we end up embodying the same mindset of those who hurt us?
[P]romoting justice and defending human dignity need not only hinge on grand self-sacrificial gestures…. That social structures are sustained by social practices suggests that the everyday is consequential too and dispels the notion that smaller or more mundane acts are too paltry and thus powerless to effect the kind of structural change justice requires.
The Spirit is the decisive factor in any ethical and political existence that would strive for truth, for justice, and for a mode of persuasion that can challenge the world’s assumptions of what is possible without rhetorically pulverizing those who do not yet agree or pretending that we are better or wiser than we really are.
Hobson, Sherman, and Paulsell are inspiring writers, and their thoughtful, learned, critical engagement with my writing is, I believe, an example of the micro-relational politics that give hope during challenging times.
Nonviolence presses us to face and points us toward the challenge of integrating charity and respect for human dignity into our practice of addressing entrenched social injustice.
The part I find most difficult to accept in Jesus’s teaching from Luke 6 is not the extent of the love he commands, but rather his matter-of-fact acknowledgment that his followers will have enemies.
By opposing the political to the mystical, we risk missing Woolf’s theopolitical reach.
These devastating times and the repeated actions informed by the continued propagation of supremacist ideals may seek to drive us into hopelessness and inaction, but we know this is not the end. History reminds us that promoting an “us vs. them” thinking is destructive to all, including the earth.
Modernism’s frequent ambivalence toward religious traditions is in part a reaction against … an affective appropriation by the state, particularly in the service of war
All human beings (including me) are capable of dehumanizing others. Moreover, all dehumanizers (including Jesus) can change their minds.