the mortgage crisis

The Our Father prayer has been spiritualized and privatized in modernity. The truth of the matter is that Jesus was speaking directly to the very immediate concerns of the poor and oppressed. The debts are financial. The bread is the tangible food necessary for life. Take a look at the Gospel of Luke - it is an economic project asserting an abyss between poor and rich; proclaiming Jesus' solidarity with the poor (and the judgment of the rich); and the importance of sharing. Jesus makes programmatic announcements and healings in an attempt to reverse the process of dehumanization caused by poverty and power structures. Jesus as the fulfillment of the Judaic law repeats Torah law with the following commands: Reduce debts. Lend without expecting reciprocation. Invite the poor into your hospitality. Provide services and goods to the poor.

There is so much to celebrate about Christianity! It embraces the best of the classical ethicists, the richness of the Hebraic tradition, and a fine balance between the contemplative and the active. And one thing is undeniable - Christianity is first and foremost about a concern for poverty. The poor challenge us at all times, and when we wake up in a world where poverty exists, we fail God and we fail one another.

In my opinion, poverty is the result of a systematic behavior of allegiances toward and participation in certain economic and political ideologies that ultimately provide material wealth to those able to operate with structurally supported self-interest, while oppressing the world's masses who live on less than two dollars a day; poverty comes from putting our will before the will of God. Private property is part of this problem. What would the world look like if property were a public good? After all property has many life-giving functions. Economist Karl Polanyi has noted that land is used for lots of things – like stability, habitation, physical safety, and he said that living without land is like "being born without hands and feet." Private property prohibits inclusive human survivability, and this is directly against God's will for life. According to the market, the private nature of property is seen as "natural," but the harms done by private property are anything but natural according to Christianity.