This new relationship and redistribution are what it looked like as people were pulled into the vortex of the Spirit. It was an intensified giving, an intensified belonging, and an intensified loving. This is what loving action practically looked like in these newly formed and forming communities.   And so, as the wealth gap is only increasing in our world—because those in power want to make it so—we need a radically new way of belonging to one another. We need people who are not okay with the status quo of ongoing economic injustice, exploitation, and inequity, but who are freed from the tyranny of power, prestige, and possessions into a radical belonging and a radical love.  Drew Jackson I am struck by two phrases: “vortex of the Spirit” and “radically new way of belonging”. I wonder whether this belonging is configured in that vortex. Normally frightening and threatening, a vortex is a whirling of water or air, a whirlpool or whirlwind. It has enormous powe...

  When I was doing the course work for my PhD I learned a remarkable lesson in Social Psychology class with Michelle Fine, one I remind myself of whenever there is a tragic gap, of injustice, discrimination, power, understanding or kindness.   One day Professor Fine put a series of hyphenated couplets on the blackboard (yes the actual blackboard with chalk!). There was a list: black-white, female-male, old-young, poor-rich, …. She turned to the class and asked: What happens at the hyphen?   After much discussion, and confusion, we came to realize that this was a demonstration of binary thinking, something to which we westerners have become acclimated. The hyphen had come to represent a barrier and demarcation of a difference which might not be reconciled or merged. What happens at the hyphen is discrimination. It is a place which is not to be crossed so long as power lies with the privileged side, so long as binary thinking prevails. It occurs to me that ever since that m...