So the Hobbits meet Strider at The Prancing Pony in Bree.

With all this talk about resisting the Shadow we might miss the theological witness of The Prancing Pony, the role of Butterbur in the struggle. Butterbur might not seem to be a huge force in the resistance, but we come to learn that he's a trusted, if forgetful, friend of Gandalf. And the most important contribution of The Prancing Pony to the resistance is that it provides safe haven for weary travelers, along with being a network of information.

This might seem to be a minor thing, providing food and safe accommodations to travelers, but it's a critical part of the story. I think here of the Shunamite woman, who provided a safe place to stay for the prophet Elisha. I also think of Mary, Martha and Lazarus in Bethany. I recall reading once an observation from Gerhard Lohfink about these friends of Jesus. He observed that not everyone packed it up to follow Jesus on his itinerant wanderings. Some of Jesus' friends stayed home, like Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, but they provided him, it seems, a Prancing Pony. A place to rest and recharge the batteries.

Butterbur is no Aragorn. Most of us aren't, but we all have a part to play. And maybe its our job to provide others with a Prancing Pony.

I know lots of progressives have their issues with the Old Testament, the genocidal passages in books like Joshua in particular. I do worry about this strain of progressive doubt. There's a shimmer of antisemitism around these progressive objections, our standing in moral judgment of the sacred text of the Jews.

For my part, I find the Old Testament to be one of the most miraculous moral documents in the history of the world.

This assessment of mine has to do with the prophets, though not in the way you might think. Just about everyone admires the moral vision of the minor prophets in their calls for social justice. And I do admire that, but what I admire most is how the prophets made it into the Bible in the first place.

Step back for a moment and ask yourself what the prophets were doing. The prophets were indicting Israel, often in searing language. Few of us would be willing to listen to or tolerate that degree of criticism. But what did Israel do? The craziest possible thing. Israel enshrined that indictment, called it the Word of God. Put it in the Bible.

I find that absolutely astounding. Truly, words fail me here. How do you take the worst things that could be said about you and make that the inspired Word of God? If I wrote a book about all of your sins and failings, would you able accept that writing as the sacred, inspired Word of God? I highly doubt it.

The capacity for moral self-criticism on display in the Old Testament is mind boggling. And it's an example for all of us. You want to wag a moral finger at the Old Testament? Fine. But show me a willingness to shake your finger at yourself on par with what you see in the prophets. I highly doubt you'd be able to pull that off.

Today, another reflection on David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved.

Universalism is often dinged for being sentimentally squishy, liberal, and PC. What could be more politically correct, theologically speaking, than espousing the view that everyone will eventually be saved?

To be sure, there are squishy, PC visions of universalism, the belief that we're all on different religious paths journeying up the same mountain.

But there's also a very non-PC vision of universalism, and Hart's That All Shall Be Saved is an example. Call this a confessional universalism. In this vision, Jesus Christ really is the Lord of History. Jesus is the Door, and the only door, through which the sheep can enter the sheepfold. There is a universalism the declares that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that, in the words of Acts 4.12, "salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved." Salvation, then, depends upon this confession.

Such claims about Jesus aren't very PC. Yes, all people will be saved, but it's not very PC to believe that all people--Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, and on and on--will one day confess Jesus as their Lord. Universal salvation is a lovely, inclusive idea, but this exclusive and particular confession about Jesus will always chaff.

To be sure, there a thousand different theological ways to smooth out this confessional offense. My point, though, in raising this issue is simply to challenge the notion that universalism is just a squishy liberal capitulation to our PC culture, where I'm okay and you're okay. Because there is a universalism that retains its shock and scandal in the exclusive claims it makes about the crucified Nazarene.

It might seem that universalism is a warm fuzzy hug, but confessional claims about Jesus will cause offense.

One of the profound insights in David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved concerns equivocality and salvation.

Equivocality isn't a common word, but it's used a lot in theological circles. Equivocality refers to words that have ambiguous and/or multiple meanings. The two go hand in hand. If a word can mean many different things, and you use that word, I can be unsure about what, exactly, you mean.

A familiar example of equivocality was observed decades ago when kids started using the word "bad" to mean something good. The equivocality of "bad" made sentences like "This is bad." ambiguous. Was the thing bad or good?

One of Hart's arguments in That All Shall Be Saved concerns how the doctrine of eternal conscious torment have made words like "good," "loving," "just," and "merciful" equivocal, and therefore meaningless.

For example, many of those who espouse (or hope for) universal reconciliation will often point to the doctrine of eternal conscious torment and ask, "How could torturing a person for all eternity be just?" The punishment must fit the crime, right? Consequences must be proportionate to the offense. That's what we mean by "justice," that it finds this proper balance. The famous principle of lex talionis--"an eye for an eye"--illustrates this: retaliation must be proportionate to the damage you've incurred, and no more. Justice is balanced and proportionate. That's what the word means.

So how, it is pointed out, can a infinitely painful punishment of an infinite duration ever be just, ever be balanced and proportionate to our offense?

The answer, at this point, from the defender of eternal conscious torment, is to dismiss human definitions of justice. "God's justice is different from our justice," we are told. "And we cannot apply our definitions of justice to God," we are informed.

To be sure, there is a truth here. We have to be very careful in how we use our words in relation to God. (Thank you, Thomas Aquinas.) But we can't completely evacuate the meaning of words like "justice" and "love" of all content. To do so makes our speech about God equivocal and therefore meaningless. Specifically, in the case of eternal conscious torment, if something we take to be manifestly evil is described as loving, just, and good, then those words are rendered meaningless.

And the situation is even worse than that. When words like "justice" and "goodness" can mean "unjust" and "evil" we've opened Pandora's Box. When words lose their meaning we can easily justify our wickedness toward others because God Himself is "good" in just this wicked way.

In summary, I think one of the deep insights of Hart's That All Shall Be Saved is how much damage the doctrine of eternal conscious torment does to our language about God. If our faith allows us to call evil things good, we're in trouble.

We are speaking with hell damaged words.

So, I've done my best over two weeks to point out and illustrate what I think is a blind spot in calls for social justice. Specifically, it is taken as axiomatic among social justice warriors that oppression and injustice are systemic problems requiring systemic solutions. Our problems are not moral. You hear this claim every time you hear a social justice warrior throw shade on the notion that change doesn't happen by asking people to change their hearts. 

To be very, very clear, by pointing out the moral and spiritual dimensions of justice work in these posts I'm not denying the systemic side of the equation. My argument isn't reductionist (systemic or moral?), it's holistic (systemic plus moral!). 

Now you might be wondering, what's my agenda in pointing out this blind spot and contradiction?

The goal isn't to deflate justice work. I want us to seek justice. But if injustice and oppression are rooted, at least partly, in moral problems, we're going to have to turn to moral solutions to address those problems. For example, how can you ask people to be anti-racist without that becoming, very quickly and profoundly, about morality?

Personally, I think many social justice warriors, deep down, know this to be the case, that the problems we are facing are deeply moral and spiritual. Let's revisit Michele Alexander's assessment:

I no longer believe we can “win” justice simply by filing lawsuits, flexing our political muscles or boosting voter turnout. Yes, we absolutely must do that work, but none of it — not even working for some form of political revolution — will ever be enough on its own. Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power.

I think the reason the moral, spiritual aspects of justice work gets marginalized is because most social justice warriors disagree with Michele Alexander. They believe that a political revolution actually will get the job done. That's the appeal of marginalizing morality and going all in with the systemic focus: it keeps hope in the political revolution alive.

But if Michele Alexander is right, if she's right that we can't "win justice simply by filing lawsuits, flexing our political muscles or boosting voter turnout," if she's right to question that "working for some form of political revolution will ever be enough on its own," then social justice warriors have to face a very uncomfortable truth. Specifically, social justice warriors are ill-equipped to lead the "spiritual awakening" Alexander thinks we need.

In short, the revolution we're all looking for is inescapably religious, and that's something most social justice warriors are unable to admit because it's a revolution they know they cannot lead. Consequently, they throw shade on any suggestion that there are, indeed, "moral, ethical and spiritual dimensions of justice work," claiming that oppression and injustice is all "systemic," that the political revolution will be enough.

That, in my estimation, is the source of all the confused, mixed messages you find in social justice rhetoric and work.

Social justice warriors want to end oppression and injustice, but they cannot lead the spiritual awakening and revolution that will get us there.

Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin make it to Bree where they meet Strider (Aragorn). Here with Aragorn we start to unpack some of Tolkien's theology concerning Christology and kingship.

When the Hobbits first encounter the king he's not very, well, kingly. He's worn and weathered. But as the poem goes:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Two theological observations about Tolkien's view of "kingship."

First, as we learn more about Aragorn as the story unfolds, we come to see that the king, as a Ranger, has spent his entire life serving and protecting others, especially the defenseless, like the Hobbits of the Shire.

Second, we also learn that the distinctive mark of the king is his ability to heal. We see this first displayed after Frodo is stabbed with the Morgul-knife on Weathertop. But the king's healing powers are on full display after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. In healing the wounded, Aragorn fulfills the old legend about the future king of Gondor: "The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known."

Humble service. Defense of the weak. Healing. These are the marks of the king in The Lord of the Rings, and in displaying these characteristics Aragorn points us toward the King of Kings.

But the truth remains, there are huge systemic issues that we have to face and big policy recommendations on the table.

For example, the case for reparations.

I support reparations. But for the sake of this post, we don't have to agree on that. What I want to point out is how many of the big policy recommendations social justice warriors put on the table require a moral revolution if they are to ever see the light of day. Just because you're suggesting a policy fix doesn't mean the root problem isn't moral. I believe this is what Michelle Alexander was talking about when she said we need a moral and spiritual awakening in America. You can't get something like reparations off the ground, politically speaking, without the majority of Americans coming to see the issue as the great moral issue of our time. Some systemic fixes will require a moral awakening.

This is precisely what happened during the American Civil Rights movement. America finally began to see the issue of civil rights as a moral issue. That's what finally got the Kennedy brothers, after massive initial resistance, to finally get on board with civil rights. Robert and Bobby began to see the struggle as a moral struggle.

My point is that even when the issues are legislative--like passing a reparations bill--the motive force of politics is fundamentally moral. Moral for the politicians to take courageous stands, and moral for the electorate who vote for a more perfect, more moral union.

There's an awful lot of preaching to the choir in social justice spaces.

You host events to increase awareness, express solidarity, and organize allies, and the people who show up are those who are already educated, active and engaged. You look around the room and realize that the people who really need to hear this, the people who really need to be there, aren't there. So progressives and social justice warriors end up talking to each other, over and over, preaching to the choir.

Something like this happened on my campus recently. An awareness workshop was being offered. People who were well versed in the issues attended, and those who needed the training didn't. So a workshop devoted to raising awareness was largely attended by people who were already very, very aware. Noting this, I shared with one of the organizers, "I think people need to have a conversion experience before they'll engage with these issues."

There's a word for this "conversion experience." We call it being "woke."

Again, for the purposes of this series I don't care what you think about being "woke" and "woke culture." My point is simply to point out that being woke is a moral issue, a matter of personal conviction, accountability, and responsibility. And being woke is very similar to having a conversion experience. Like the apostle Paul's road to Damascus experience, the scales fall from your eyes. The blind now see. The sleeper awakes.

And to the point of this series, being woke isn't a systemic issue. There's no policy fix or systemic way to forcibly convert people, to make them woke. You can persuade, you can evangelize, but you can't compel people to become woke.

Becoming woke, opening your eyes and heart, is a profoundly moral journey.

Again, the social justice blind spot is that it says all our problems are systemic when much of its energy, focus, and recommendations are moral.

Another example of this is how much time and effort we put into organizational and institutional education and training. Consider how if an employee acts or speaks in a sexist or racist way they would have to undergo sensitivity training. Consider how colleges require their students to receive training and education concerning consent in sexual encounters. Consider how most businesses require workplace harassment training. The examples are everywhere.

To be sure, you need systems and policies to deploy and compel people to undergo these various trainings. And again, for this series I don't care what you think about these trainings, if you think they work or are counterproductive. I don't care about that for this series. The point I'm making is that all these trainings are focused on addressing moral problems, how people treat each other, especially one on one. All these trainings and educational programs are basically forms of moral education and improvement, learning to treat each other with fairness, respect, and care.

In short, a lot of social justice effort isn't just about moral policing, it's also about moral development and training. 

Here's another example of how social justice efforts focus on morality, despite claiming that oppression and injustice aren't moral but systemic.

A huge amount of social justice talk and effort is focused upon the issue of privilege. We've all heard how we should, if we have it, recognize, "check," or use our privilege. So, for example, as a white male I have "privileges," cultural clout and power, that women and people of color do not. Consequently, there are situations where I need to check my privilege to center others. I should also use my privilege to empower others.

Like in my last post, I don't really care, for the sake of this series, how you feel about privilege and the intersectional analysis that helps us identify privilege. My point in these posts isn't to debate any of that. My goal in these posts is to point to a blind spot in social justice.

The blind spot is that, while it is true that privilege has been brought about by systemic forces, the calls to check privilege or use privilege to empower others are moral appeals. Asking someone to "check" their privilege isn't a systemic fix, it's a moral request. 

To be clear, there are things that can be done, systemically, to address imbalances of privilege. For example, we could pass equal pay laws to combat wage discrimination between men and women. But calls to check or use privilege aren't policy fixes, they are moral appeals directed at individuals, appeals that can be rejected or embraced. A person could refuse to check their privilege, and there's nothing illegal about that, nor will there ever be. That person could just choose to be an asshole. The world is full of such people, and there's no "systemic," legal, or policy fix for that moral problem. 

So, once again, we see the social justice blind spot. As the entire conversation about "privilege" illustrates, social justice warriors claim they are focusing on a "system" when in fact they devote a great deal of their time making moral appeals.

Eventually, Frodo makes his move and leaves the Shire, finding himself pursued by the Black Riders.

He's headed to Bree, hoping to meet Gandalf. And on the journey to Bree we meet one of the more enigmatic characters in the story, Tom Bombadil.

It's unclear who or what Tom Bombadil is. In his correspondence Tolkien left Tom's origins a mystery. Tom is a narrative loose end that Tolkien never tied up. From the hints we can gather in the text, Tom, along with Goldberry, is some sort of primordial nature spirit or god. Alone, in seems, in Middle Earth, the Ring of Power doesn't affect him.

Tom Bombadil is a beloved character among many Tolkien fans. He is a favorite of mine. I used to walk in the woods of my grandparent's house singing Tom's song:

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the Master:
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.

But for this series I'd like to make a contrast between Tom Bombadil and Rivendell.

Specifically, when Elrond's Council gathers to discuss how to deal with the Ring of Power, a discussion about Bombadil takes places. Perhaps the Ring could be given to Bombadil for protection? But this idea is dismissed. Fleming Rutledge, in her book, describes this conversation under the heading "Tom Bombadil's Uselessness."

The point to be observed is this. Tom exists in an innocent state of nature. He lives in a world walled off from the concerns of the outside world. And while that makes a stay at Bombadil's house idyllic and enchanted, that loveliness cannot last, not with the Shadow growing. In the end, even Bomdadil would fall before the Darkness.

Rivendell, by contrast, sees the threat and takes action. Rivendell is just as enchanted and magical as the house of Tom Bombadil, but Rivendell hasn't retreated into self-isolation. Rivendell is resistance.

As much as we'd love to linger at Tom's house, the church is called to risk and engagement with the world.

What I'd like to do in a few more posts is give examples of how this blind spot, the reality that oppression and injustice is as moral as it is systemic, manifests itself in social justice talk and work.

These examples will mainly be illustrations of a contraction between social justice rhetoric and social justice practice. Specifically, the rhetoric of social justice is that oppression "isn't a moral problem, it's a systemic problem," and yet the practice of social justice often boils down to moral policing.

Take, as our first example, what we observe in call out and cancel culture and in movements like #MeToo. Much of the energy and effort in these movements is focused on finding and exposing bad moral actors, people who express racist or -phobic views or who are agents of oppression.

Now, there's been a lot of talk about the merits of this sort of social justice activism. But that's not the point of this post. I don't care, for the sake of this particular conversation, if you think call out and cancel culture, or movements like #MeToo, are necessary or have gone to far. My point is simply to draw attention to the blind spot these cultures and movements illustrate between social justice rhetoric and activity.

Specifically, I don't know if you've noticed, but social justice activity is very moralistic--very, very moralistic. There are good people and there are bad people, and the goal is to locate, name and marginalize the bad people. And again, I don't care about if you think this activity (for example, mob-shaming on Twitter or no platforming) is good or bad, effective or ineffective. I just want to point out that it's a form of moral policing, identifying, outing, and ostracizing the bad people.

All this illustrates the blind spot I'm pointing toward. The rhetoric of social justice is that we have systemic problems on our hands that require systemic solutions. And yet, the practice of social justice has primarily become one of moral policing.

And again--to be very, very clear--I'm not questioning the moral policing. That's another question for another time. What I'm pointing out is that the moral policing illustrates that social justice warriors don't actually believe what they are saying. Our problems are, indeed, very, very moral. And if you watch social justice activity, you'll see ample evidence that they also admit, with their actions, that this is the case. Oppression and injustice isn't just a "systemic" problem. We're also dealing with moral problems.

Below is how in Reviving Old Scratch I made Michelle Alexander's point from Part 2, digging a bit deeper into how moral and spiritual problems create social justice issues.

In this passage, I dwell upon the German word "Zeitgeist," the "spirit of the age," the moral and spiritual atmosphere of a culture at work in every action and decision. The point I make is that while statistics can measure social inequity, they struggle to capture the invisible forces--the Zeitgeist--that produce these sad metrics. We see the evidences of injustice all around us, but we have trouble putting our finger on the invisible causes:

I recently took a bus trip with twenty preachers from my faith tradition through historic locations in the American civil rights struggle in Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham. Ten of the preachers were black and ten were white, and we took the trip to talk about race relations in our churches and in the nation. One of the things we spoke about is how the struggle for racial justice has changed since the 1960s. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the sit-in movement, the Freedom rides, and Freedom Summer, direct-action campaigns were aimed at concrete and visible locations of Jim Crow segregation. From segregated seating on buses to obstacles to voter registration. And with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in ’64 and ’65 these overt locations of injustice were removed from American society. Apartheid officially ended in America. And yet, America continues to be a highly segregated society and racial injustices persist. From police shootings to poverty to mass incarceration to the quality of schools, we are awash in the sad statistics that reveal the racial injustices still plaguing America. But with the official ending of apartheid in America, where, today, are we to find the sources of these injustices? To be sure, there is still much work to be done on the policy front to make our society fairer and more just. Caring as I do about the criminal justice system in America, there are many things still to fix, from mandatory sentencing to capital punishment, to say nothing about how the rich have access to quality legal representation in a way the poor do not.

However, as we rode through the South, those twenty preachers and I suspected that these policy fixes were only small tweaks in what was a larger, more spiritual problem—a problem with the American Zeitgeist. As one of the black preachers said, “It’s not the laws that are the problem, but the unfair implementation of the laws.” For example, stop-and-frisk laws are not, as they sit on the books, inherently racist. The problem comes when those laws are applied unfairly, used mainly against African Americans, sweeping greater numbers of them into the criminal justice system. Today we don’t mainly detect systemic racism by examining written laws and policies. Today we detect racism by outcomes, in things like poverty or incarceration statistics. Something is happening between policy and outcome.

According to the preachers on the bus, it’s the Zeitgeist. On the books, apartheid may have ended in America, but we are still plagued by a spirit of racism. Racism is what causes policies to be implemented in a biased way. But racism isn’t a law or policy. Racism is a Zeitgeist, a spirit, an anti-Jesus force at work in the world.

Which puts the political activist in a bit of a pickle. March and protest all you want, but racism, as a spirit, can’t be fixed by passing laws. Political activism is largely impotent in addressing the spiritual problems facing America and the world. A new president or a new Congress isn’t going to heal what ails us. If the Zeitgeist is the problem, then the battle is no longer merely political. The battle is inherently spiritual in nature.

For example, during our bus trip the twenty preachers and I spent time with Fred Grey, who was the lawyer for Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Outside of Thurgood Marshall, Grey is the most significant civil rights lawyer in American history, the lawyer who filed seminal school integration lawsuits and who represented the victims of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. During our time with Brother Grey, he said something that gets to the distinction between the spiritual and the political and our stubborn lack of racial progress since the ’60s.

“I was able to change the laws,” he said, “but I couldn’t change the hearts.”

In Part 1 I argued that one of the blind spots of social justice is the belief that oppression and injustice is primarily, if not wholly, a systemic problem. This is a blind spot because it ignores the moral and spiritual aspects of oppression and injustice.

I'm not the first or only person to make this observation. For example, I've shared before on the blog Michelle Alexander's social media post explaining why she was leaving Ohio State's law school to teach at Union Theological Seminary. As a WOC and the author of The New Jim Crow, Alexander has some social justice clout, and this is what she had to say in making her announcement about reducing social justice to a purely political fight:

This week I officially joined Union Theological Seminary in NYC as a Visiting Professor. I have known for some time that I need to stretch myself, move beyond what I know and out of my comfort zones. As a lawyer, it comes naturally for me to speak only when I’ve done all my research, know all the facts, and can make my case. Law, policy and advocacy have been my world for more than 20 years, and my singular passion for 10 of those years has been finding ways to awaken people to the racial dimensions of mass incarceration and help them see it for the human rights nightmare that it is.
And yet I now feel compelled to change course. I am walking away from the law. I’ve resigned my position as a law professor at Ohio State University, and I’ve decided to teach and study at a seminary. Why?

There is no easy answer to this question, and there are times I worry that I have completely lost my mind. Who am I to teach or study at a seminary? I was not raised in a church. And I have generally found more questions than answers in my own religious or spiritual pursuits. But I also know there is something much greater at stake in justice work than we often acknowledge. Solving the crises we face isn’t simply a matter of having the right facts, graphs, policy analyses, or funding. And I no longer believe we can “win” justice simply by filing lawsuits, flexing our political muscles or boosting voter turnout. Yes, we absolutely must do that work, but none of it — not even working for some form of political revolution — will ever be enough on its own. Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power. American history teaches how these games predictably play out within our borders: Time and again, race gets used as the Trump Card, a reliable means of dividing, controlling and misleading the players so a few can win the game.

This is not simply a legal problem, or a political problem, or a policy problem. At its core, America’s journey from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration raises profound moral and spiritual questions about who we are, individually and collectively, who we aim to become, and what we are willing to do now.

I have found that these questions are generally not asked or answered in law schools or policy roundtables. So I am going to a place that takes very seriously the moral, ethical and spiritual dimensions of justice work: Union Theological Seminary. Union has a proud history of deep commitment to social justice, and I am happy to call it home for awhile.

This is the bit that I think points to the blind spot of social justice:

I no longer believe we can “win” justice simply by filing lawsuits, flexing our political muscles or boosting voter turnout. Yes, we absolutely must do that work, but none of it — not even working for some form of political revolution — will ever be enough on its own. Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power.

When we reduce oppression and injustice to systemic issues we ignore, in Alexander's words, "the moral, ethical and spiritual dimensions of justice work."

As someone deeply invested in social justice in recent years I've come to see a blind spot in how social justice is talked about, conceptualized and pursued.

To be sure, we all have many blind spots, and so do social justice warriors. These posts are devoted to just one particular blind spot that I've noticed and have been thinking about a lot. Consequently, these posts would be more properly titled "a social justice blind spot" rather than "the social justice blind spot."

Let me state the issue quickly. By and large, when we talk about social justice we are told, over and over, that injustice and oppression are systemic rather than moral problems. And given that these are systemic issues, calling on people to be "better," morally speaking, does little to change these systemic issues.

We can appreciate some of the motivation behind this moral/systemic divide. The logic has been that, by and large, people tend to see themselves as good people. For example, we don't see ourselves as racists. No doubt we are, but that's not something we readily admit. So, the call for social justice shifts the rhetoric, and you see examples of this all the time: Fine, you're not racist, but the system is racist. So let's change the system.

Now, when you step back and look at that move, you can appreciate both its rhetorical genius and its foolishness. The genius is that, by shifting away from moral indictment and asking us to own our own racism, we can shelve that hard issue to focus on systemic issues. That shift makes us less defensive and allows the conversation about racism to continue. That's a neat and effective rhetorical move.

And yet, it's also foolish. And I hope you can see that. The move shifts the conversation toward racist systems while leaving the issue of racism to the side, as if these have nothing to do with each other. For how can you expect to change racist systems if you leave racism wholly intact and unaddressed? The whole "it's not a moral problem, it's a systemic problem" is pure folly.

Now it might be argued that social justice warriors know this is folly, that they are using the "it's a systemic problem" frame purely as a rhetorical strategy, simply to get the conversation about race started. "It's a systemic problem" is just a foot in the door strategy. It gets us talking about race because we're talking about "the system" rather than ourselves, which is a much harder conversation to have.

The trouble is, I think the vast majority of social justice warriors actually do believe that the problems are wholly systemic. You see examples of this all the time.

Consider the reactions to the movie The Green Book, the Oscar-winner for Best Picture. Social justice critics decried the film for being out of step with the times. And why? Because The Green Book told the (real life) moral story about Frank Vallelonga coming to face his racism as he drove Dr. Don Shirley to his concerts through the South. According to the critics of the movie, this intimate moral story missed the point that racism in American isn't going to be solved by white people (like Frank Vallelonga) being taught lessons about racism by indulgent black teachers (like Dr. Don Shirley). More, friendships between blacks and whites are going to do little to affect or change...wait for it...the systemic forces of racism in American society.

To be clear, I'm not denying the huge role systemic forces play in oppression, nor am I suggesting that black folks must assume the responsibility of educating white folks. What I am pointing to is how many social justice warrior frequently dismiss and decry any focus on the moral rot the fuels and energizes the system. And yet, as should be obvious, the two are inseparable. It's foolish to think you can change a racist system while never addressing racism at the personal and moral level.

This, then, is what I want to point out in these posts. One of the huge blind spots of social justice activism is how it dismisses, and even sneers at, the moral aspects of the problems facing us to proclaim that the issues are wholly "systemic" in nature.

In these last few posts we've been sitting in the Shire with Gandalf and Frodo, mostly in the chapter "The Shadow of the Past." We've been teasing out the threads that weave the theological tapestry of the story. In the past few posts we've been paying attention to large forces at work in the story, the providential "something else at work" and the dark powers in the world that moral heroism alone cannot defeat.

But before we leave the Shire, let's pay attention to a small, but decisive force upon which the entire story hangs: the Pity of Bilbo. The Pity of Bilbo, his choice to not kill Gollum, is this tiny stone thrown into the great pond of history, rippling out to be, in the end, the decisive act that brings about the defeat of Sauron.

In "The Shadow of the Past," Gandalf and Frodo are discussing Bilbo's encounter with Gollum in The Hobbit. Frodo declares, "What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had the chance!"

Gandalf's response to Frodo's murderous outburst:

"Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need...My heart tells me that [Gollum] has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and that when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many..."

The title of the chapter is apt. Bilbo's pity will indeed cast a very long shadow in the book. One act of pity and mercy in The Hobbit runs like a golden thread through to the very end of the story.

Notice also, as Fleming Rutledge points out, how Tolkien capitalizes Pity and Mercy in his response to Frodo. That's a sign from Tolkien that Pity and Mercy aren't just one off "random acts of kindness." Pity and Mercy are the way we participate in the providential "something else at work" in the world. Small though they may be, through this divine participation acts of Pity and Mercy are forces, like ripples in a pond, that affect and shape the history and destiny of the world. The smallest acts of Pity and Mercy can be, in the end, the most consequential, the points upon which history turns.

The world is cold. Someone must be on fire so that people can come and put their cold hands and feet against that fire.

--Catherine Doherty

Much of the spiritual formation literature works with what I call "the trickle down theory of spiritual formation."

The two greatest commandments work with a vertical and an horizontal axis. The vertical: Love God. The horizontal: Love your neighbor.

By and large, the spiritual formation literature, with this focus on spiritual disciplines and liturgy, suggests that if we work hard on the vertical dimension, loving God, this love will eventually "trickle down" into loving our neighbors. Ponder the various spiritual disciplines: Prayer, devotional Bible study, Sabbath, fasting, etc. Think also of worship and liturgy. Each of these sends us up along the vertical dimension, the notion being that getting closer to God should open our hearts toward others.

But does it always? Does our love for God "trickle down"?

The argument I make in Stranger God is that it doesn't always. We can become so absorbed in the vertical pursuit of God that we forget our neighbor right next to us. So what we need, as I argue it in the book, is a uniquely horizontal spiritual practice, a practice that gets us moving horizontally toward each other. And one example of this practice, as I share, is the Little Way of St.Thérèse of Lisieux.

I believe, pretty strongly, that if we don't have a robust horizontal formation practice, our love of God will routinely fail to "trickle down" upon others.

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

— George Eliot

I love quotes that capture the power of the Little Way. This is one of them. 

After healing a crippled beggar in Acts 3, Peter delivers a sermon in the temple to the amazed onlookers. At the climax of his sermon Peter says this:

Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord. (Acts 3.19)

The Greek word anapsuxis translated as "refreshing" only occurs once in the New Testament, here in Acts 3. The literal meaning of anapsuxis is to catch your breath again. It can also mean a cooling, refreshing breeze, being revived with fresh air. In one of her Easter sermons, Fleming Rutledge translates anapsuxis as "breathing space."

In our anxious and stressed out world, anapsuxis is very good news. We're drowning and struggling for air. We need a moment to catch our breath again. We need to feel a cool breeze upon our face.

We need some breathing space.