Tag Archives: social justice

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

The Office Above the Man, Justice, and Gingerbread

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I was thinking about the Roman Republic and Empire lately, and, no, it wasn’t a leftover from the Tik-Tok curiosity the other week. It was for my job, working on a humanities course. The text described how Romans formed their government initially with two political bodies, one restricted to families with old Roman blood, the other for plebians. The plebians pushed for political opportunity and got laws in place that allowed them to stand for election to important offices. This was an important shift from appointing a man of good standing from within the ruling class to establishing an office with legal responsibilities for anyone who holds it. It elevated the law above the man.

Liberty within the law is an important democratic principle. If a governor is just the man in power, he rules in his own interest, and if he’s wise, he will build up the whole region, but if he’s interested only in his own leisure, he will consume what he can for as long as he can at the expense of the people. But if the governor is an office with legal responsibilities and accountabilities, then whoever is put in the office has a public role to fulfill. He is a public servant.

This idea is being threatened by those who wish to redefine us into categories with rights and privileges inherent to those categories. They are working on us to view each other as types, some with innate goodness, some with innate justification, and some with innate wickedness who can do no good apart from submission. It undermines our liberty within the law and argues for those with the right blood lines to take control.

On this subject, I heard a good conversation this week on Cairn University’s defragmenting podcast with the author of Reforming Criminal Justice. Attorney Matthew T. Martens explains how politics has divided terms and concepts incorrectly, and how justice is a matter of Christian love. As host Dr. Keith Plummer puts it, there’s something in this book to ruffle everyone’s feathers, but it sounds like a well-composed argument for respecting our fellow citizens within the responsibilities of the law. Look into the book here.

What else do we have today?

Farming: Here’s an outside list I think you’ll find interesting: 22 Books about Farming, Food and Agricultural Innovations

Ministry: The Gospel Coalition 2023 Book Awards has some good titles, including an encouraging book on “’dechurching,’ why they’re leaving, and how we might thoughtfully engage them.” The media paints its own picture of people leaving the church; the truth is far more complicated and hopeful.

For comparison, look over the 2023 books selected by For the Church.

Gingerbread: The OED offers an interesting etymology of the word “gingerbread,” which is a seasonal food I enjoy year-round.

  • In the 13th century, gingerbread was preserved ginger, spelled as “gingebrad” or “gynbred.”
  • By 1450, the word was recorded as meaning the “cake, pudding, or biscuit” we know of today, though ginger isn’t a key ingredient, if included at all.
  • In the 17th century, it began to be used as slang for money. “Without commission: why, it would never grieve me, If I had got this Ginger-bread” (1625).
  • There’s also an obsolete use from 1664 meaning “superficially attractive,” whether that’s a person, word, or action.

Photo: Socks the Cat Standing Next to the Gingerbread Replica of the White House: 12/05/1993 (The U.S. National Archives, Public Domain)

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Steps Toward Healing Wounds of Jim Crow

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Social justice is an unwelcome term in some circles, calling to mind political opportunism and race baiting. Many other people use the term to describe what Christians should understand (and should have understood for centuries) as properly loving your neighbor. Author and professor Anthony Bradley says maybe we need to lay aside social justice in favor of transitional justice, the kind of measures taken in response a state that has ignored proper judicial measures for a long time.

In fairness, America did attempt to redress issues with voting, housing, employment, and the like. The blind fallacy, however, was the belief that we could change a few federal laws and move on. But we moved on without addressing the need to foster peace and reconciliation between whites and blacks, especially in the South and large urban areas. We moved on without dealing with the post-traumatic stress of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. We moved on without holding people and institutions accountable for massive amounts of person-to-person and structural injustice.

He offers seven principles for America to use in healing the wounds we still feel, urging us not to skip to the application before building the foundation. Here’s #2.

It is quite unbelievable that African Americans were not given formal opportunities to recount, on record, exactly what happened during Jim Crow. A truth commission would allow us to hear the truth about Jim Crow. We need to gather firsthand accounts while we still can. Without getting the truth on record, we run the risk of exaggerations of history on both sides. It would be safe to say, as a result, that the average American under the age of fifty cannot explain the details of what life was like for blacks during Jim Crow. Individual states still have opportunities to establish Jim Crow truth and reconciliation commissions.

And from #3.

Recognizing survivors of Jim Crow as suffering real harm, including economic harm, would have allowed us to contextualize both their trauma and struggles with agency in the years that followed. Instead, America largely chose a “let’s just move on and not talk about the past” approach with a few one-size-fits-all federal legal remedies, which ultimately failed to deliver much of what they promised by the time we reached the 1980s.

Non-fiction, Religion

Standing with the Oppressed

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There is beauty in this land, but I don't always feel it.

The growing pains in the Evangelical church today are in America’s race problem and the issues of social justice. I heard a pastor this year say Jesus’ message was largely one of social justice, and if I hear that term with political ears, I reject it. If I hear “social justice” and think “social gospel” and all the bad theology that has been woven into that, then I can’t help but reject it, but if I understand “social justice” to mean loving one’s neighbor, then I can accept it, maybe not as my primary choice of words, but as an understandable choice.

Believers today need to come to grips with the particulars of loving our neighbors, rejecting the political hostility and individualism that may feel natural to us. How much has personal comfort (ignoring real sacrifice) become our standard for judging God’s will for our lives?

A few days ago, a pastor in my denomination and his daughter were arrested for demonstrating in the St. Louis metro area on the anniversary of the shooting of Mike Brown. I believe he was trying get a petition heard by a federal marshall. They were arrested for obstructing entrances that were already obstructed by official barricades. They talk about it with Jamar Tisby here. This is moving. I encourage you to listen to this.