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.
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.
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.
Sometimes the most I can be grateful for is that it is still possible to imagine an alternative.
As the villagers of Pudukudi Melur showed in their moment of radical hospitality, true freedom is not about protecting one’s rights or maintaining boundaries; it is about breaking them open in love.
Mt. Carmel represents a very particular vision of Divine power, one dependent on a definition of power that equates it entirely with the strength to impose one’s will on another – even to the point of death. It’s an astonishing demonstration, yet also an extremist one, requiring power to equal unfathomable force: the unquenchable fire and Elijah’s subsequent unquenchable thirst to eliminate his enemies.
Faith in God must always be lived out through care and love for one’s neighbors.