romans on Inequality

My friend Ray McMillan introduced me to the Liberty Bell as a perfect object lesson for America’s racial divide. In addressing why “the bell won’t ring,” Ray describes the crack as a perfect illustrat...

Very often, comparison to an ideal is a helpful practice, not a harmful one. Helpful comparisons are those that place a normal or ideal condition on one side of a scale and a real-life condition on th...

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...

I was sixteen when a white deputy sheriff shot and killed my twenty-five-year-old brother, Clyde, in New Hebron, Mississippi, where we had grown up. Clyde had returned home from fighting in World War ...

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...

One night I went to church Confronted by rampant inequality and discrimination built into the laws, Black Christians were a driving force in making the American public confront the racism in our mid...

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

Comparison is the root of most of the misery we feel in life. Comparison makes it impossible to view ourselves from any sort of godly perspective. It is an absolute snare for the soul. Consider what c...

In their book Friend and Foe, social psychologists Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer cite a study by Emory University scientist Frans de Waal regarding comparison. De Waal trained capuchin monkeys ...

It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into nothing. Murder is no better than lies if lying does the trick.

Equity in law is the same that the spirit is in religion, what everyone pleases to make it: sometimes they go according to conscience, sometimes according to law, sometimes according to the rule of co...

Like many popular adages, this one about all sins being equal before God is not entirely wrong. Every sin is a breach of God’s holy law. And whoever fails to keep the law in one point is guilty of bre...

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line....

There is a helplessness in poverty that precedes the move of God in our lives because we understand an aspect of grace that so many miss: we do nothing to earn it. When we understand this, all becomes...

Every person enjoys dignity and suffers from depravity. The structure of personality is a result of the interaction of these two dynamics.

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 the 21st century. But oc...

One of the great ironies of sin is that when human beings try to become more than human beings, to be as gods, they fall to become lower than human beings. To be your own God and live for your own glo...

We probably got a bit too cocky about how well our lives were going. But after disability showed up in our family, we learned that life is not tame. It’s not here to align with our desires and plans. ...

An Unfair Deal Despite our vast differences, there seems to exist an innate sense of “fairness” in all humans when it comes to things such as “waiting your turn” or “cutting in line.” One would be ha...

I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christia...

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to makes us love one another.

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.

A God who cannot suffer is poorer than any human. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely ...

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality, but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

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.

When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the ...

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.

The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there. No, it is for a far larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sin...

"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very ...