In the next few moments, I want to take a look at the bigger picture of which Barbara’s life reminds us, and to which it testifies. This is the good news: Barbara’s life can make us see a bigger picture and something that is happening in the world, which is bigger than us. I take this to mean that we are never alone, even if it may sometimes feel that way. This is, of course, what Christians believe, but this is also what many other faith traditions tell us. Even people who don’t embrace any particular faith often have an acute sense of something bigger at work than the individual, and many intuitively grasp that we are not alone.
Joerg Rieger, Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice, recently appeared in two episodes of the Faith & Reason podcast and unpacks the distinction between religion and politics. Listen here.
This podcast episode was recorded Wild Goose Festival 2018. In it, Joerg Rieger, Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice, discusses the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics, which are the subjects of his book Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (Abingdon 2018).
While there is concern that religion and politics have entered into relationships that are too close, we should be even more concerned about the relation between religion and economics. Here are three questions to consider.
Rather than asking how much authority the Bible should have in an ideal world, a better question would be what role the Bible actually plays in people's lives.
Joerg Rieger and Peter Laarman unpack structural poverty and to address religion’s stake in the dramatic growth of economic inequality in American society.
Unlike in the Roman Empire, many of our images of Mammon resemble our images of God. Instead of Caesar’s image that was imprinted on Roman coins, US Dollar bills bear an image of the Trinity and the words “In God We Trust.”
Some people of faith are too timid when it comes to conflict, some are too eager to embrace it, and for whatever remains we have conflict resolution. This conclusion, however, is mistaken.
The future of the poor, of racial and sexual minorities, of working people (to which 99 percent of us belong), and of the environment, is never entirely in the hands of individuals, no matter how powerful they may be at the moment.
A nagging problem remains that those who talk about stratification and the poverty line are unable or unwilling to address: What about the relationship between the classes?
As we are being bombarded with enticements that reach all the way into religious worlds, how can religious communities and their theologies escape being shaped by the neoliberal capitalist economy?
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