Brian Zahnd on the Fourth Beatitude

Some thoughts from the excellent Beauty Will Save the World:

When Jesus says "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (dikaiosyne)," he is also saying "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice." The Greek word "dikaiosyne" can be translated as both righteousness and justice. Unfortunately it is far more often translated as righteousness than justice....[this] allows us to shrink God's comprehensive justice to the realm of individual spirituality and private piety....we pry apart the two concepts (righteousness and justice) and gain the mistaken idea that God is interested in our spiritual condition but not our social arrangements

The politics of Jesus are neither right nor left, but transcendent, and Jesus' politics present a challenge to both liberals and conservatives. For example: If your liberal politics prevent you from defending the rights of the unborn and the sanctity of the family, you do not share the politics of Jesus. Likewise, if your conservative politics prevent you from defending the rights of the poor and the immigrant, you do not share the politics of Jesus. Jesus is pro-life and pro-family; he is pro-poor and pro-immigrant. (But he's not running for office, because he is Lord!)

Each day, for every child who dies of hunger, the nations of the world spend $176,000 on security (which means defending themselves from one another). One hundred seventy-six thousand dollars per dead child on defense?! Do we really not see the madness and the injustice of this?! But we tell ourselves it's just the way things have to be. If we don't build billion-dollar bombers, things will go wrong—as if something has not already gone very, very wrong!....The very least the righteous can do is to ache over this and yearn for a better way. Hopefully the righteous can do much more than ache and yearn, but any step toward building a better world begins with a painful acknowledgment that the present arrangement is unacceptable.

Easing back in....

Because (as I/others might have predicted) I have been undisciplined as a blogger, and because I feel it is a good thing to sort of ease back in to such activities, rather than peeling off a 4,000 word post I'll simply say that one of the greatest literary joys I have had in a long time came from reading "A Desirable Woman," Wendell Berry's story from his newest collection, A Place in Time. I didn't think any of the stories in this collection would grab me in the ways that his earlier fiction did. I was wrong. This story of a young minister's wife is not only significant because it presents the most positive minister character in his work so far; it is also among the finest pieces of fiction he has ever produced. It is a beautiful story. That is all.