justice

“Those who enact unjust policies are as good as dead,

those who are always instituting unfair regulations,

to keep the poor from getting fair treatment. . ."

After describing encounters with the oppressed in South Africa and Honduras, Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a carefully honed analysis of justice within a Christian framework.

Some questions won't go away. The creed says Jesus was crucified "for us," but what do those two little words mean?

I’m taking a class on the Gospel of Luke this semester, and one of my assignments is to engage in an ongoing spiritual practice related to that particular Gospel. So for the entire semester I am reading the Magnificat daily. It’s a passage that I’ve been drawn to in recent years, but it has been particularly illuminating to be dwelling on it during Lent this year, since it is typically confined to the Advent season. Somehow the triumphal language of the justice that God has already accomplished fits with the modern treatment of Advent as a celebratory season. But Lent is a season of penance, which puts an entirely different spin on the text.

In Justice in Love, Nicholas Wolterstorff rejects egoism, eudaemonism and utilitarianism as inadequate ways to think about the practice of well-being.

Yes, political advocacy is more effective than Band-Aid-style charity. But are those the only options?

About ten years ago I started to become vegetarian. But although my menu shifted, my Christian observance continued pretty much the same. A cradle Anglican, I was a graduate student at King’s College, Cambridge. Evensong in chapel was a staple of my spiritual diet, often followed by dinner in the hall. Although physical sustenance came right after spiritual sustenance, I had little sense of a link between the two beyond the notion that sharing food with others was a good thing to do and that one should not take too much food in order to leave plenty for others. As a Christian, I was not unusual in failing to make connections between faith and food.

The poverty in the immigrant Dutch Reformed community where I grew up was not grinding poverty, but almost all families were poor. It was egalitarian; people were treated alike.

“Are you scribes gone awry?” Jesus asks us. “Have you got good religion?”

Samuel, the Billy Graham of his day, was adviser to the political leader Saul, the Pete Rose of ancient Israel. Samuel anointed Saul to be the first king of Israel. But soon (to quote James Thurber), “confusion got its foot in the door” and went through the entire “system.” Samuel observed Saul disobeying the explicit word of God, and it became Samuel’s job to inform Saul that God had rejected him as king.