Joe

Last week closed with a quote from Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich!”

Given the spiritual nature of this site, this might seem somewhat out of line. Even if you buy into my argument that spirituality isn’t spiritual, eating the rich does not sound very loving. So before we explore how to eat rich fools, we need to take a moment to reflect on how to be loving to rich and poor alike.

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The Parable of the Rich Fool attacks the delusion of a self-made person like no other teaching of Jesus. Yet the American narrative of opportunity and possibility, which undergirds the illusion of meritocracy and keeps the nation undignified, continues to guide the country. So what does Jesus say and how does he challenge us to live?

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Did you know that when I was getting ready to launch Abundance Reconstructed a year ago, my goal was to form an online community where people could discuss many of the topics I bring up in these weekly emails? While a Discord channel from those early days remains, the idea never really took off.

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If you are an American who embraces the spirituality of Jesus, supporting reparations, especially for indigenous Americans and descendants of slaves, is a given. It is simply an essential act to demonstrate dignity to millions of people. Reparations declare that these lives matter.

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America is an undignified disaster. Black people needing to cry out that their lives matter too is a dignity issue. The opioid epidemic gutting the once-thriving blue-collar rust belt flows directly from the desire to escape from an undignified existence. Even the rise of White Nationalism and other hate groups stem, in part, from a quest for dignity. After all, those living in dignity have no need to carry a tiki torch and insist they will not be replaced?

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What makes a dignified society? For those who, like Jesus, embrace the wisdom of the cosmological myths of Genesis, that question undergirds politics. What must a society do to honor universal human dignity? How do we structurally declare to everyone that they belong?

[Read more…] about Why Leviticus is More Dignified Than America