![Power, Reconciliation, and Accountability](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/image-600x600.jpg)
The tendencies of any group of human beings to normalize power and hide harm are themselves, then, subject to the process Matthew’s gospel is describing. The frankness of communication, of subsidiarity mediation and conflict negotiation, the expectation of honest and mutual accountability described here should also be applied, as healthily and faithfully as possible, to the workings of authority, relationship, and power system within the community.
![The Politics of Scripturing—Matthew 5:21-37 (D. Mark Davis)](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/17-02-12-Ten-Commandments-600x600.jpg)
Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount unsettles many biblicist ways of understanding Scripture. It may even be better to move from speaking of ‘the Scriptures’ as a noun, to speaking of ‘Scripturing’ as a verb.
![Waldensians, Women, and Preaching as a Political Act](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/preaching-600x536.jpg)
One Sunday around 1173, in Lyons, a wealthy financier named Waldo heard a traveling singer tell the story of St. Alexis, the son of a Roman senator who fled his family, became a beggar, and took to a life of prayer and service. Moved, he hurried to talk to a theologian, who told him of Jesus’ exhortation: if you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have, and give it to the poor. And so he did.
![CFP—Political Community: Authority in the Name of Community](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Kings_College_Aberdeen_-_geograph.org_.uk_-_108991-600x421.jpg)
The Center for Citizenship, Civil Society, and the Rule of Law will be hosting a conference at King’s College, Aberdeen this coming June 24-27. Here is the text of their CFP:
Call for papers – annual CISRUL workshop and PhD summer school
![Book Preview: Monastic Wales edited by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber](https://politicaltheology.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/monastic-wales.jpg)
Medieval religious houses were more than enclosed communities of men or women who spent their lives in prayer and worship, striving for their own salvation and interceding for the salvation of humankind. Clearly this was part of the story – it was not for nothing that the medieval historian Orderic Vitalis called monasteries ‘citadels of the Lord’, or that monks were commonly regarded as spiritual soldiers fighting against the power of the Devil and his cohorts.