james on Fairness

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.

Robert H. Richards and Ethan Couch illustrate how opportunity bends toward affluent white males. Richards was found guilty of raping his three-year-old daughter, but because of his connection to the D...

Preaching Commentary Rumble in the Temple It is important to remember that Jesus’ confrontation with the “chief priests and elders” at Matt. 21:23–27 follows closely on the heels of His triumphal e...

The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.

Justice is for those who deserve it; mercy is for those who don't.

As any parent of small children will tell you, children have an amazingly acute sense of justice. Even the most fractional disparity in the distribution of the most trivial family good will be met wit...

In Disney’s Snow White, when the wicked witch stares in the mirror, she asks a basic question: “Who’s the fairest of them all?” It is a natural, human tendency to measure ourselves against others. But...

God, the fact that we feel uncomfortable is evidence that we perceive the injustices in our world. We don’t ask you to help us hear the cries of injustice, but rather to give us courage to act against...

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am.

Self-righteousness is a sense of moral superiority that appoints us as prosecutor of other people’s sinfulness. We relate to others as if we are incapable of the sins they commit. Self-righteousness w...

Father God, too often we show preference to those who appear to have it all together, to those whom we consider complete: the self-motivated, self-made, and self-sufficient. We honor the rich and look...

The Golden Result is a corollary to the Golden Rule, which calls us to do to others as we would have them do to us. The Golden Result says that people will usually treat us as we treat them. If we bla...

God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that we may live deep within our hearts. God bless us with righteous anger at injustice, oppression, and exp...

Peace is not the absence of war but the presence of justice.

After the fall of apartheid in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu led his country in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC rejected the two extremes normally implemented after such...

Gracious God, our hearts are often divided between what is good and what is evil. Not one of us is pure in heart yet we long to have a whole heart. Where there is hypocrisy in our life, please n...

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

On the fifteenth of each month, Alicia has thirty dollars withdrawn from her checking account to sponsor Belyse, a beautiful, brown-eyed girl from Kenya, who then gets school and a hot meal each day. ...

In his 2008 book, Just Courage, Gary Haugen, a lawyer by training, describes an interesting legal precedent known as “void for vaugeness.” Haugen used the precedent to illustrate how vague ideas of Bi...

If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.

As my AA, NA, and CA friends have repeatedly reminded me, rigorous honesty is the first rule of recovery.

Righteous God, we receive your grace and forget your justice. You teach us to move with compassion yet we have remained complacent. God, forgive us for our complacency and our apathy. Fuel us with you...

In his book, A Peculiar Glory , John Piper provides an illustration of the kind of faith we are called to. This is no “blind faith,” in which we are supposed to simply believe without using our minds...

When did the topic of justice become important to you?” Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us wer...

Lord, help us to be a people known for the ways in which we live out our faith by loving and serving all people, even those who, in the world’s eyes, have little to offer us. By treating them with dig...

Teach me to feel another's woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

Preaching Commentary A Highly Practical Text Often we come to scripture passages that require a bit of interpretive twists and turns to find ways of connecting the text to our modern-day lives in t...

Faith is nothing else than trust in the divine mercy promised in Christ…. This trust in the goodwill or mercy of God first calms our hearts and then inflames us to give thanks to God for his mercy so ...