Quotes
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“…an honest comparison is not always in our favor.”
The tendency to hold certain practices in ancient Israel up to idealized modern Western norms is pervasive in much that passes for scholarship, though a glance at the treatment of the great class of debtors now being evicted from their homes in America and elsewhere should make it clear that, from the point of view…
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“…our increasing greed and our increasing anxiety…”
Horses and chariots in the ancient world of course had to do with armaments, the city filled with arms, instruments of self-securing, and there is no end to this either, because the arms must increase to match our increasing greed and our increasing anxiety. Many of the horses and chariots in the end, of course,…
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“…no option but to live in penitence…”
The Church, however, addresses itself to all human violence, in all human beings. If it is to be itself, it has no option but to live in penitence, in critical self-awareness and acknowledgement of failure. It must recognize constantly its failings as a community to be a community of gift and mutuality, and warn itself…
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“A commitment to the common good…”
The historic definition of the “common good” is the most good for all people. But today this definition has a competitor called the “public interest.” In this presupposed progressive view, the most good for the most people is all that matters. Only one word changed but the implications are enormous. A commitment to the common…
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“…less romance and more love…”
Perhaps what contemporary Christians need is less romance and more love… Real love is unitive and community forming; it weaves people together into familial and churchly networks of mutual care and dependence on one another and on God. Husbands and wives, neighbors and friends, children and grandchildren, widows and orphans, all are adopted by God…
David W. Swanson 