Justice and Love

Here is a link to a video message from Dr. Stephen Long, entitled, "A Vocation for all Vocations: How the Virtues of Justice and Love Understood in the Christian Tradition must Transform Everything, from Work to Rest." Here is the audio link. He presented at a conference on Film, Faith and Justice at Seattle Pacific University on April 7th.

He says that justice informed by love requires a different kind of politics. It requires not a negative freedom, to be free from one another, but to be free for one another, bound together in charity, living together under a notion of a common good, a truth, seized by a beauty which only comes from the glory of God. Our faith requires that we have a place for others.

Our task is not so much to get a plaque of the ten commandments into public places as it is to live the commandments and to create a group of people who can embody their way of life in the world in such a way that they are not compelled to use force and coersion and power to get their way. Then we will have a justice transformed by faith and hope and love and we will recognize that it will require all aspects of our life. It will require that we make room for others who are different from us. The blood that is shed cries out. Our task as Christians is not to engage in propaganda, but to live our lives in such a way that our lives would not makes snese if the God we profess is not true.