Liberal ethical tropes around “fairness” and “inequality” are not wrong. But they are not enough. Political theology needs the possibility of an absolute “No” in the face of injustice. It needs the decision.
John the Baptist offers a way for us to rethink Advent, suggesting that the advent of the kingdom demands the advent of justice.
The Prophet Amos employs the plumb line as a powerful metaphor for justice in society.
Not merely a time for ‘leisure’ or ‘recharging’, the notion of sabbath involves deep concepts of justice.
At Easter we should remember that anger and fear cannot win, but that joy can.
Sometimes effective resistance necessitates speech or decisive direct action. Yet sometimes resistance also demands a tactical silence.
Mary’s Magnificat challenges us to bend our sight, to look both forward and backward. For without a vision of the future, without a messianic hope, we can only ever mourn the past—we can never envision its regeneration, a new heaven and a new earth.
The divine prohibition upon images in the Torah rested in part upon the fact that idols take the place that belongs to human beings as those created in the image of God. What idols occupy such a position in society today?
Through his encounter with the Canaanite woman, Jesus undergoes a conversion experience from his ethnocentrism. In the ugly shadow of recent events in Charlottesville, we must follow his example.
There is perhaps no biblical virtue more foreign to the contemporary Western mind than hospitality. For us, the deeply ethical connotations of hospitality for the stranger—the resident alien or refugee—have been largely replaced with a call for general neighborliness and an often all-too-partisan welcome.
The events of the first Easter invite illuminating parallels and contrasts with the shock and terror of contemporary state violence.
The practice of gleaning, commanded in Leviticus and illustrated in the narrative of Ruth, disrupts the sort of connection we may suppose exists between the ownership and the use of property. The principles of economic justice it implies can guide us in our contemporary politics.