injustice

The biblical foundation for a holy practice

Christians helped create it. Can we help destroy it?

Melanie Harris claims that abuse of the earth parallels the injustices faced by women of color.

Five-Carat Soul is filled with hilarious storytelling, unusual characters, and stark realities.

Jesus wants us to be likable—but more importantly, he wants us to love.

How can God speak through what is soft and breakable? How can we?

A justice system oriented mainly toward punishing offenders can have tragic consequences.

The Enlightenment view of autonomous human subjects is built into the law, so the criminal justice system floats on myths and superstitions.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was the book of my youth. I didn’t grow up poor in Depression-era Alabama, but I identified with Scout as I read it several times in my teens. My childhood was a middle-class family in the integrated Bronx, but Scout and I shared a house full of books and a lawyer-father blessed with a firm, centering integrity. Later, studying journalism at NYU in the 1980s, I heard that if you wanted to learn what good writing was, read Mockingbird every year.

I'm afraid I want the good news of Christmas without the challenge.

When a child is ignoring basic responsibilities, parents rely on a well-known parenting technique to make a point. Mom looks her ten-year-old in the eye while holding a toothpaste tube in one hand and the cap in the other. “This is called toothpaste,” she says, “and this is called a cap. They go together.” The Lord God is not beyond impatience and remedial instruction when people need a reminder about neglected responsibilities. God held a basket of ripened summer fruit beneath Amos’s nose and said, “Amos, what do you see here?” The prophet, sensing that God was serious, didn’t bother joking. “A basket of summer fruit,” he replied. With that brief exchange, strangely similar to a parent remedially instructing a child, the doors opened to a flood of divine wrath.