This week we get into this beatitude as translated by Eugene Peterson: “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.”

Is it possible to stand firmly on the side of justice and build cooperation over competition? What might it look like to take the side of justice and compassion without alienating individuals, without making it about “conservative” or “liberal?” We are in tricky times, revealing times, to say the least. In this conversation we recognize that we stand on the shoulders of many prophets or “inspired teachers.” We explore what it could mean to be a prophetic voice that stands with meek, the humble, and the poor. True justice works for the most people most of the time, and as Jane Addams proclaimed, “Progress has been slower perpendicularly, but incomparably greater because lateral.” Let us work to build a lateral web of compassion and inclusion.

Thanks for listening.

Books mentioned:

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Martin Luther King Jr, Why We Can’t Wait

Albert Nolan, Hope in an Age of Despair