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Chadwick Ray acknowledges the growing income disparity in the United States but wonders, citing Paul, if the Christian qualities of piety are not "indifferent to economic circumstances." We would follow Reinhold Niebuhr here who, in The Interpretation of Christian Ethics, distinguishes between the force of piety (gratitude for the goodness of life) and the force of spirituality (contrition for its evil), and warns about using one at the expense of the other. He writes: "Whenever the prophetic faith that all…

"God is not a Democrat or a Republican." One in five students receiving a diploma at Calvin College this past May wore these words somewhere on their cap or gown. The purpose was to let the world--and the commencement speaker, George W. Bush--know that no party has a monopoly on holiness. This is also the central message of Jim Wallis's God's Politics, a book that attempts to extricate the political commitments of American Christians, especially evangelicals, from partisan politics by…

The movie Sideways, winner of an Oscar and two Golden Globes this year, leaves viewers laughing so hard they cry. Some of the tears flow because Sideways conjures up the times when life pinches us. When we feel trapped. Losers. We describe such moments in different ways. We say we are spinning our wheels. We sigh that we are stuck in a rut. We feel like a square peg in a round hole or, in an antique expression, like we…

It's astonishing to me that such a wide range of products can be obtained with money. I don't enjoy paying bills any more than anyone else does, but I find that I enjoy peace of mind every time I make out a check for an insurance premium. Having mailed off a premium, I find that in some measure I am free to "give no thought for the morrow." My anxieties--some of them, at least--fade away as I provide for the…

How might we negotiate the issue of homosexuality while holding to a traditional Christian sexual ethic amidst ecclesiological chaos and fragmentation? How can we advocate for this perspective in the church and public square? The answers to these questions are intensely practical, and one article cannot do them complete justice, but I want to open one possibility by proposing an ecclesial ethics of otherness.Perhaps the only place in our affluent American lives where avoiding the other seems improper, even damnable,…

In his review of Anxious About Empire (Perspectives, May 2005), William Katerberg charitably represents the stance of Jean Bethke Elshtain who scolds those Christians not willing to get their hands "dirty" by compromising, for instance, a Christian commitment to peace and nonviolence. On her account, Christians who criticize the Iraq war, or war in general, are not willing to deal with the "reality" of being citizens engaged in "this world." But I've heard the virtue of "dirty hands" extolled by…