current affairs and causes from luke 4

I hold that in every situation of injustice and oppression, the Christian—who cannot deal with it by violence—must make himself completely a part of it as representative of the victims.

The Enlightenment was, among many other things, a protest against a system that, since it was itself based on a protest [the Reformation], could not see that it was itself in need of further reform. (...

Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers. Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There...

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 ...

When I remember that the literal translation of the term gospel is “good news,” I recall a wonderful encounter with her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. In the summer of 2001, I f...

One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and powe...

There are many people who will always want to return to the time when America was great. But was there ever a time when America was a wonderful place for everyone? As I saw on a Facebook meme recently...

The first thing to notice is that violence is intentional. For example, one of the most brutal forms of violence affecting millions of poor women and girls in our world is sex trafficking. Lured a...

There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervio...

Leader: As Jesus began his earthly ministry, he said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.” People: Through the Holy Spirit, we too have ...

Leader: Through the grace of Christ Jesus who gave His body and shed His blood for our forgiveness, hear and believe that “he delivers the needy when he calls, the poor and him who has no helper. He h...

Jesus says to us, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight...

From the outside Calvary Church in Holland, Michigan, looks like a typical large church that many Americans attend. The church developed the typical way: it started small and then began to grow. As th...

Jesus showed his solidarity with the poor through his teaching, parables and lifestyle. It is no coincidence that in his very first recorded message he referenced the poor… Imagine God incarnate makin...

In his excellent book, Just Courage , founder and CEO of the International Justice Mission, Gary Haugen articulates some of the realities behind the systemic oppression of the poor around the world...

We are handicapped in the white church. If I preached Jesus’ first sermon (Luke 4:14–30) and gave it the social emphasis that He gave, our church has no vehicle for doing anything about the problem. P...

In October 2014 Wired magazine reported on the dirty work every social media company must somehow handle: moderating the deluge of exploitative, degrading content posted in unimaginable quantities aro...

In his now famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail , Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offers a scathing rebuke of his white clergy colleagues, whose inaction caused him much frustration: I have heard numero...

I recently met with Heather, a woman who attends my church in New York City. After graduating from Harvard Law School she landed a lucrative job with a major law firm in Manhattan. It was a dream come...

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...

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...

Martin’s [Luther King] voice was more than the communication of intellectual ideals and spiritual vision. It was a call for action, action which he personally led. . . . [Martin] saw leadership as a p...