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.
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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.
Liberal denialism is key in deflecting any responsibility or accountability, and it is this position of “not taking a position” that enables the impunity of perpetrators, enabling even more violence.
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.
Mapping normative rhythms and their interruptions, recovering voices and paths of antagonism, conjuring counter-plagues: these are the critical imperatives for the riotous times of the present.
Worship, with its “meaning-laden symbols, repeating rituals, sacred texts, shared song, prescribed prayers, re-enacted narratives,” has a way of moving the worshiper away from what is proscribed to what is prescribed; in effect, from the vices of corruption to the virtues that promote the common good.
Even homemade, organic eucharistic bread made with fair trade flour and kneaded in commitment to the life of the poor is not exempt from the kind of death-dealing economic structures that make such bread possible. While we may long for it to be otherwise, we are always both in and of the world.
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.
When we perceive La Santa Muerte devotees as people operating outside of the rules instead of people seeking God in the messiness of a broken world, we miss the fundamentally holy desires that operate alongside the damaged ones in these practices.
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.