An Unedifying Discourse on Baptism, Downward Mobility, and Walking Away Sad
The theological case that the gospel makes a claim upon our money and our shared economic life has already been convincingly made, for anyone with ears to hear. From Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Cornel West and Delores Williams, Black theological voices in the United States have clearly shown the connection between anti-Black racism and the economic interests and forces shaping the country: keeping Black folk impoverished has always been essential to keeping white folk with means in control, such that the gospel’s word of liberation from the bonds of racism has always also been the proclamation of good news to and for the poor.
If you are a white evangelical church kid of my generation, and so were kept from ever encountering Black theological voices as authoritative for Christian theology and faith, there were white evangelical voices at the margins of the tent who shared a similar message, though in their work, poverty almost always eclipsed racism: see, for example, Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and the emergence of Evangelicals for Social Action; Sojourners magazine and the downwardly mobile intentional community in Washington, DC, to which it was connected; and more recently, the Simple Way community in Philadelphia. The life of Dorothy Day and the witness of the Catholic Worker movement set a high water mark for poverty-aware Christian discipleship in the United States, and Latin American liberation theology’s lifting up of God’s—and so also, the church’s—“preferential option for the poor” has had a relatively significant impact upon academic and even some church-based theological discussion in the United States, even if mostly to provoke defensive reactions.[1] If you are really paying attention, you have probably also encountered some or all of the voices named in the call for papers for this issue: Douglas Meeks, Kathryn Tanner, and Devin Singh.
Yes, the theological case has been convincingly made, and certain lives have been lived—and too many lost—embodying this theology in powerfully prophetic, incarnational witness. And yet the vast majority of Christians and churches in the United States—progressive as well as conservative; readers of The Other Journal as well as readers of Moody Monthly—remain relatively rich in a world of global poverty and hunger. This is certainly true for me.
So what is to be said about the gospel’s claim upon our money and economic status in such a context?
I’ve been thinking and worrying about what the gospel means for my relationship to money and economic status since 1982: thinking about what exactly the gospel is asking me to do and what a faithful response to its claim upon my life would actually look like; and worrying not only that I am not doing nearly enough but that, deep down, I am simply unwilling to do whatever enough would entail. I know the theological answers by heart: a “concrete conversion of life . . . a class conversion in the sense of involving actual solidarity with the poor.”[2] And I believe them. I’ve believed them for forty years. Yet, I’m pretty sure I remain a good distance from “actual solidarity.” What, then, could be said now that has not already been said very powerfully—and even more powerfully lived out in embodied faith—that may yet move the needle, that may yet move Christians like me (and you?) from thinking and worrying to decision and action? Whatever it might be, I am fairly certain it is not to be found in the words that follow.
Hear, then, my confession.
Calling All Rich Young Rulers
What the gospel says to us about our relationship to money depends, of course, upon how much money we have. I suspect that those of us who think and worry about what the gospel says about our relationship to money do so because we are uncomfortably aware that we have more of it than most of our fellow humans—at home in the USA but especially abroad—and probably more of it than we truly need. We are aware that we are not the poor to whom Jesus came to preach good news and for whom Jesus is the good news; we are not the poor whom Mary prophesied would be filled by God’s presence and action in Jesus and the Spirit. Indeed, we wonder whether we might be among those that, in Mary’s song, Jesus will send away empty-handed. We cannot avoid the occasional worry that what Jesus said to the rich young ruler is also being said to us, that following Jesus includes the concrete act of selling all we have and giving the proceeds to the poor.[3]
Given that, according to US standards of poverty, most of the global community lives on or below the poverty line, I am assuming that if you are reading this in the United States, you, like me, have more in common economically with the rich young ruler, from a global perspective, than is comfortable. If the way of the gospel for the rich young ruler involved giving away all he had to the poor in order to follow Jesus, then why would that claim not also be laid upon us, who, in our own time and place, can be found in the general ballpark of the world’s wealthiest 10 to 20 percent? According to the World Inequality Report of 2022, if you make $100,000 per year—a very doable sum for senior professors of theology in many of the more prominent US seminaries—you are within a stone’s throw of the world’s wealthiest 10 percent; $75,000 per year would put you in the top 15 to 20 percent. Only make $35,000 per year? Don’t see yourself as a rich young ruler? Then how would you characterize your economic status next to fully half the world’s population who are likely working harder than you and making only $4,000 per year? And that’s the high figure.Most make less; many make much less.[4]
The white evangelical culture and theology that formed me had a very convenient answer to the troubling question raised by the story of the rich young ruler. The answer was simply that the specific response of Jesus to the rich young ruler was intended for them alone, and so it was not to be taken as a generally applicable requirement of discipleship. Instead, we were to identify whatever it was in our lives that we loved more than Jesus and were unwilling to give up to follow Jesus.
That is, Jesus was able to see into the heart of the rich young ruler and see that it was the love of money that came between them and Jesus, that they would be unwilling to part with their money in order to seek first the kingdom of God. Furthermore, it was very important to emphasize that it was the love of money—and not the money itself—that was the problem. The claim of the gospel upon the life of the rich young ruler was specific to their particular spiritual disposition and need, the particular idol that truly ruled supreme in their heart. Being rich—having money to spare while so many others don’t have close to what they need—was perfectly compatible with the gospel and with following Jesus as long as we didn’t love our riches and, more particularly, didn’t love them more than Jesus, as long as we would be willing to give up all our money to and for the poor if Jesus were to ask that of us. At the end of the day, then, Jesus was not, in fact, asking us to give away all our money and give it to the poor so that we might follow him. In fact, the passage wasn’t even really about money at all. We were being taught a theological lesson about the spiritual disposition of our hearts: we are not to love or trust anything—money is just one of many possible, substitutable examples—more than we love and trust Jesus.
Phew! Crisis averted.
However, that still left open a troubling possibility. If someone other than the rich young ruler did, on the outside chance, happen to love their money more than Jesus, then, if we follow through on this line of white evangelical interpretation, Jesus’s words to them would indeed be the words he says to the rich young ruler. The way of salvation and discipleship would necessarily include their giving away their money to and for the poor and following Jesus. One could be forgiven, then, for wondering, in light of the relative wealth of my white US evangelicals and of so many Anglo-European Western Christians and churches through history, if the rich young ruler were perhaps the only prospective disciple who ever loved his money more than Jesus.
Alas, deep in our hearts—at least the hearts of those of us who have savings accounts, retirement portfolios, college funds, and vacation plans—we know that this is not the case. We know that we love and trust our money more than we love and trust Jesus. We know that if Jesus were to tell us—was in fact telling us, in the story of the rich young ruler—to sell all that we have and give it to the poor in order to follow him, we would walk away sad.
What Color, the Rich Young Ruler?
These confessions and reflections are by a white, mostly straight, cis-, normatively abled rich young ruler in the context of a racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist United States. If they resonate in any way with the reflections of readers who are differently located, I take that as a witness to the multiplicity and simultaneity of oppressions and identities, the complexity of which we are becoming ever more aware. As just one example, in Knowing Christ Crucified, the womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland tells the story of a vocationally successful and relatively economically comfortable Black woman who catches a glimpse through her apartment window of another Black woman across the street digging through garbage cans for food. The first woman turns out to be herself. Reflecting on this experience, Copeland asks some astonishing questions: “How often do those of us who belong to privileged groups”—which she elsewhere describes as, “for example, whites or black theologians”—“conveniently overlook the incriminating criticisms of the privileged that the narrator of Luke’s Gospel places in the mouth of Jesus? How often do we excuse ourselves from human communion with poor, despised, hungry women and men?”[5]
It is clear that economic privilege cannot be divorced from white privilege in a country still so thoroughly in the grips of its founding white supremacy. Worrying about having more money than one needs is a sign of economic privilege that, historically, in the US and European contexts, has been primarily reserved for white folks. However, Copeland’s reflections suggest that we cannot simply ignore the complex multiplicity of social location and identity that questions about money and economic status inevitably raise. In a white supremacist United States, I assume the gospel has has a very specific word of judgment to say to me, in my whiteness, that it does not say to Copeland. And yet, without negating that truth, it appears we can also find ourselves called by that gospel into strange and unexpected partnerships in pursuit of solidarity with capitalism’s disenfranchised poor. I say this without authority, of course, but merely as one trying to grapple with the meaning of Copeland’s stunning insistence on placing herself in a “privileged group” alongsideme—at least in relation to those who must search for food to eat in city garbage cans—and so to some degree under the judgment of a gospel that is good news for the poor.
Christians—especially Christians of privilege who are shaped by the normative Anglo-European theological traditions—need to think long and hard about what it means that the gospel witness to the one Word of God (I’m showing my Barthian cards, here) says different things to different people, specifically, to differently situated people (and here we have James Cone and Copeland cards interrupting and reorganizing the Barthian deck). To cite Jesus himself, the gospel says something different to “the last” (e.g., “you shall be first”) than to “the first” (e.g., “you shall be last”) (Matt. 19:30 and 20:16 paraphrase). In other words, the differences in our social locations in relation to each other determine the different ways we are situated in relation to God—not a God in general, but the God who shows up in the very particular, concrete, socially located flesh of Jesus—and so determine the different things the gospel has to say to us at any given moment and in any given context.
Baptism
What exactly is the claim the gospel makes upon our relationship to money if it finds us closer to the neighborhood of the rich young ruler than to the poor? What does it mean that, if Jesus is addressing us in that story, and if we are honest with ourselves, we must confess that we join the rich young ruler on the path leading away from Jesus with our hearts filled with sadness, that despite all our sophisticated social, political, economic, and theological analyses of class, capitalism, the market, and the unjust structures of poverty, and even our sincere confession of faith in God’s preferential option for the poor, we continue to find ourselves, with Copeland, separated from the concrete reality of poor folk by a distance that feels infinitely wider than the width of a city street?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about these questions in terms of baptism. In an extended conversation about his work, Walter Brueggemann uses the New Testament story of Zacchaeus to make a valuable observation about baptism.[6] For those needing a reminder, Zacchaeus was a corrupt Jewish tax collector working for the despised Roman occupation. As the story goes, Jesus invites himself to Zacchaeus’s house for lunch, and as a result of this encounter, Zacchaeus vows to restore to all those he defrauded up to four times the amount of money he had taken. And it is in response to this that Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9 NRSV).
Brueggemann suggests that Zacchaeus’s conversion in the encounter with Jesus involved the remembering and reclaiming of his true identity. Zacchaeus had forgotten who he was. He had forgotten he was a Jew, and had come to think of himself as a Roman tax collector. In encountering Jesus, he remembered that his true identity was not that of an occupier and exploiter. Rather, his true identity placed him among and in identity with the occupied and exploited. And this had radical economic implications for him personally. Brueggemann relates this reading of the story to Christian baptism and its meaning for our relation to the existing economic order. He suggests that like Zacchaeus, Christians and churches tend to forget our true identity; we forget the meaning of our baptism into the community and company of Jesus. We find ourselves behaving like comfortably situated citizens of the culture and economy of the prevailing established order—as consumers, employees, employers, homeowners, landlords, retirement fund holders, taxpayers. We move with the speed and flow of the economic traffic, staying within the lines, following the traffic signals of free-market capitalism, doing our bit to ensure the uninterrupted flow of goods and services and cheap labor along the existing thoroughfares of commerce, which then bring ever more affordable efficiencies and comforts to our door. And before you know it, we find ourselves in the tree next to Zacchaeus, with Jesus looking up at us, asking what’s for lunch. Brueggemann suggests that if, in this encounter, Christians and churches remembered who we were and reclaimed our baptism, “the commodity economy” would crumble.[7]
In a similar vein, I have been thinking about Søren Kierkegaard’s poetic treatment of the story of Abraham and Isaac atop Moriah as a kind of theology of baptism, thoughts that have been made available in their fully fleshed form elsewhere. Contrary to much popular and scholarly opinion, Fear and Trembling does not describe Abraham’s faith as the willingness to sacrifice Isaac to and for God. It is the precise opposite: his faith is shown in his refusal to give up Isaac and his expectation of keeping Isaac for this life on the basis of divine promise and possibility alone—in short, he believes God will not, in fact, take Isaac from him.[8] The single movement of infinite resignation is what Fear and Trembling describes as the religious willingness to sacrifice our loves and our world—in Abraham’s case, Isaac—to and for God. But Fear and Trembling continually focuses our attention on the fact that this is precisely what Abraham does not do. It consistently opposes Abraham’s faith to the movement of infinite resignation. Abraham makes a double movement wherein his giving up of Isaac as a natural possession based on biological, filial, ethnic, cultural, and civil ties is at every moment both anticipated and accompanied by a holding to Isaac in faith, for this life, not as a possession by natural right and/or traditional authority and custom but as gratuitous gift from the hands of God alone.
It is this double movement that I suggest sheds light on the meaning of baptism: a giving up of all creaturely relation that is simultaneously an acceptance and embrace of the world as gratuitous gift from the hand of God alone. In baptism, we let go of possessions and property while also entering a new life of mutual participation in the good gift that is our embedded, embodied life with God and neighbor in and with material creation. Traditionally, baptism is meant to signify dying with Christ. We are to share in some very real way the very real death of Jesus and so die to the world. We are to be as dead to the fallen world as Jesus was on Saturday. And what does dying to the world mean but that everything must go: our old identities, relations, possessions, securities, status. They say you can’t take it with you. In baptism, we are to leave everything we thought we owned, everything we thought we were, behind in the waters of baptism.We die to all we are and have as we enter the water. If churches were doing it right, every baptism would be followed by an estate sale in the parking lot.
But we mustn’t forget that baptism is a double movement. The point of dying to the old world is so that one might be raised to life in and for a new one—the same good creation but a radically new way of living in it. In rising to new life in and with Jesus, we are reborn into the world as newborn babes without a stitch of clothing (recall that the burial clothes of Jesus were found lying neatly folded within the tomb), not a dollar to our name, no possessions at all. We walk God’s good earth as the living dead but not as zombies do, with the faded, tattered remnants of the clothing of their old lives still clinging to their bodies. No, in baptism, that old clothing is like the remnants of old wine skins that for us have burst irreparably and will no longer do. Those tattered shreds of clothing are the remnants of the possessions and private property that rule the world in its alienation from God—and our lives within that world—to which we have died. They are to remain buried in the waters of baptism. Unlike zombies, the baptized are the dead that have been raised to new life, in all its fullness—a creaturely life finally lived in the truth that everything belongs to God alone so nothing can belong to anyone else, a life where no one owns anything and so all are able to share everything. To live as the baptized is to live in community without possessions or private property, holding the garden in common while owning no piece of it, such that everyone shares what is available so that everyone has what they need and none have more than they need while others go without.
This, of course, is why the birth of the church was an explosion of voluntary wealth redistribution (which, it must be said, began to go south almost as soon as it began). It is why Brueggemann suspects that if Christians and churches ever reclaimed baptism and remembered their identity as those called into the company of Jesus, the wineskins of the current economic order would burst at the seams.
If we are on to something here, this also means, as I just hinted above, that Christians began forgetting their baptism and identity almost immediately.[9] It would mean that the histories of the normative churches as they have allied themselves variously with empire, the state, the merchant classes, robber barons, corporate benefactors, national and/or hegemonic cultural identity and power, are histories of forgetting and betraying baptism by striking bargains with various versions of Rome. In which case, we should probably not hold our breath for Brueggemann’s vision of the reclamation of baptism and the collapse of consumer culture and free-market capitalism. If every church and confessing Christian did in fact reclaim their baptism in this way, we would likely discover that there are, in fact, very few Christians or churches around—at least, not in the social, economic, and cultural spheres in which most of us reading this magazine live and have our being. We would likely find that very few Christians and churches with money and private property would be willing to live out the meaning of their baptism by committing it all to a shared communal life of mutuality in the company of Jesus among and with the world’s poor.[10] We would discover that most of us—those of us who are at least relatively comfortable members of Western churches eating at Caesar’s table—are in fact rich young rulers walking away from Jesus in sadness, with bank accounts, possessions, and property intact.
The Impossibility of Becoming a Christian in Christendom Capitalism
If the meaning of baptism helps us understand the gospel’s claim upon our money, particularly as relatively comfortable Christians in a world of poverty, and if that claim is all of it—that having died with Christ we are dead to our money, possessions, property, having been born as new creatures into a new life of community and mutuality where nothing belongs to us so that the good gift of God’s creation can be shared and held by all, according to their need—then it would appear that most of us falling within the economic demographic of The Other Journal’s readership find ourselves alongside the rich young ruler, walking away from Jesus in sadness. Who among us has not been walking away sad for their entire journey of faith?
And if this is the case, then one fairly obvious option for integrity presents itself: we dispose of baptism altogether.[11] Or at least we eliminate the death and resurrection language of baptism wherein we claim to die to the world with Christ to be raised as new creatures into a new community in and for that very world. In this respect, the Protestant mainline traditions have long been well on their way to disposing of the radical significance of baptism, with their sprinkling of infants dressed in special finery—it is my crazy US evangelicals, with their full immersion of shivering adults stripped down to the bare necessities in lakes and rivers, that come closest to the true meaning of the death and resurrection language of baptism; though in doing so, they court the greater hypocrisy when returning from baptisms to uninterrupted material lives of consumerism, possession, accumulation, and private property together with a nationalist commitment to protect that way of life—claiming it to be God-given!—at all costs.
In the movie Tender Mercies, a country music star on the skids finds himself washed up on the doorstep of a weathered gas station and two-room motel in the middle of nowhere that is run by a single mom and her young son. They take him in, and he begins a new life helping out with the place and staying off booze (the true reality of baptism in the story). Along the way, he and the son get baptized at the local church. In the cab of the truck on the ride home, the son says—and I’m paraphrasing—“Everybody said I was going to feel like a changed person. But I don’t feel a whole lot different. Do you?” The country singer chooses honesty over sentimentality and responds: “Not yet.”
I’m guessing this resonates with many of us who have experienced adult baptism. If we did feel any different—say, like a new creature might feel, perhaps an ecstatic feeling of spiritual awakening, a mountaintop high of radical transformation—I’m betting the feeling didn’t last all that long.
However, ifthe church remembered its identity and reclaimed the meaning of baptism, we may not feel any different upon being raised from the waters of the baptismal tank, but we damn well would soon enough. Given that all we own—our possessions and our property—dies with us and lies buried in the baptismal waters, we will not be driving our truck back to our home from the baptismal service (to stick with the Tender Mercies analogy). Instead, we will be waiting for a bus in the heat and dust with fellow community members and a few homeless people met along the side of the road, all heading back together to what once was our house but is now a communal space of shared purse and labor in which we have a room. That is going to feel pretty damn different. And it will be the feeling of the beginning of our salvation. And it will be a feeling rooted in a material reality that is in no danger of evaporating like the morning mist.
Until Christians and churches live out their sacrament of baptism in concrete ways that look something like this reimagined scene from the movie, the only way to honestly and faithfully respond to the gospel news of God’s being radically and irrevocably for all in Jesus Christ through the Spirit, the last, first, is to confess how we are not yet Christian, and the church is not yet the church.
Better Well Hanged than Ill Wed
It may be worthwhile to remember a bit of Kierkegaard, here.[12] It is better to be honest about our inability to be a Christian and our collective failure to be the church than to fake it—than to continue the farce of baptism and Christian identity as new creation while we are unwilling to sign the papers of divorce from Rome, while we still cling to the comfort and security that nuptial relations with Caesar make possible. The first step in the rich young ruler finding his way back to Jesus—for who is to say that walking away sad was the end of his story?—is honesty about his failure before the radicality of the ask, about his inability or unwillingness to say yes to Jesus, to follow Jesus along the way that leads to the last becoming first. Kierkegaard was fond of saying that it was impossible to become a Christian as a citizen of European Christendom.[13] Perhaps the same is true today for us as denizens of the global free market. Perhaps then the first step for us to become Christians is to realize the extent to which we are not yet Christians, and the church is not yet the church.
Kierkegaard, of course, was very clear about his own failure to respond to baptism’s radical call. He had no pretensions about living out the life of a baptized Christian himself; he saw himself as always only on the way. Yet, through the voices of pseudonyms, he felt it important to keep the radicality of the gospel—for example, the kind of dying to the world required by Jesus’s response to the rich young ruler—clearly before himself and before his very comfortable state church in its very profitable marriage to the political, economic, and cultural principalities and powers of nineteenth-century Europe.
For Kierkegaard, the harsh light of this demand did not close the possibility of finding ourselves within the vicinity of the narrow gate. In the glare of that light, we can at least avoid mistaking ourselves for the poor and outcast. And the rich young ruler may offer some service of witness to how the gospel continues to call after us, to haunt us, to pursue us like the hound of heaven refusing to leave us be, refusing to allow us to again sleep soundly in Caesar’s bed.[14] We, who live in the long, relentless shadow of baptism, take our place alongside the rich young ruler, walking away from Jesus in sadness. Yet, like the rich young ruler, we are not left only to despair of our salvation. We may yet find ourselves on a path that is, after all, directed by Jesus’s response—in small, haltering steps, in and with the patience of grace, one loaf and fish at a time.
In the meantime, read Cedric J. Robinson’s An Anthropology of Marxism, Dean Brackley’s The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, and Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope, and if you feel yourself being led to do something crazy, make sure you do it collectively. Focus on relationships with the poor and outcast more than financial figures and bank accounts; avoid the classic tradition of a group of well-meaning white folks moving into communal flophouses in poor neighborhoods of color; make sure there are at least some in the collective mix for whom it would be an upwardly mobile move, as equal partners with agency—not simply recipients of largesse—whose voices are at the center; share your money, possessions, and property with the poor in such a way that they also work for the poor, in a way that resists and dismantles structures and policies that create and require poverty.[15] And, oh yeah, absolutely no individual charismatic male leaders!
[1] Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Option for the Poor,” in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, ed. Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría (Orbis Books, 1996), 22–37.
[2] Clodovis Boff, “Methodology of the Theology of Liberation,” in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, ed. Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría (Orbis Books, 1996), 10.
[3] See Luke 1:46–55, Matthew 19:16–30, Mark 10:17–31, and Luke 18:18–30.
[4] Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, et al., “World Inequality Report,” 2022, World Inequality Lab, https://wir2022.wid.world/.
[5] Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Orbis Books, 2018), 124. My emphasis.
[6] See Brueggemann and Clover Beal, An On-Going Imagination: A Conversation about Scripture, Faith, and the Thickness of Relationship (Westminster John Knox, 2019).
[7] Brueggemann, On-Going Imagination, 117.
[8] See Chris Boesel, In Kierkegaard’s Garden with the Poppy Blooms: Why Derrida Doesn’t Read Kierkegaard when He Reads Kierkegaard (Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2021), 191–202; and Kierkegaard, Fear andTrembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (Penguin Books, 1985), 53–54. Those who pursue C. K.’s thinking in Kierkegaard’s Garden will discover their pseudonymity, and the reasons for it given in that context. The reasons for using C. K.’s voice here are (a) the thoughts expressed here have their roots in the theological vision attributed to C.K. in Kierkegaard’s Garden; and (b) they express a vision of Christian faith that the author cannot identify as their own, but one that challenges the author along with and alongside the reader.
[9] See Acts 2 and 4, followed by Acts 6:1–4.
[10] See Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) for historical examples of Christians who attempted to live out the meaning of their baptism in this way; they were invariably branded as heretics by ecclesial authorities while slaughtered as revolutionary threats to law and order by political powers. Jesus does not say “count the cost” for nothing (see Luke 14:28 NKJV).
[11] After all, who knows, perhaps the death and resurrection language of baptism is simply a hyperbolic metaphor for a wholly spiritualized (as in many conservative theologies) or psychologized (as in many liberal theologies) reality that has nothing much to do with the material realities of our embodied lives together that God created good.
[12] “Better well hanged than ill wed” is the line Kierkegaard uses as the epigraph at the beginning of Philosophical Fragments (1844). It’s a paraphrase of a line from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
[13] See Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, vol. 2 (Harper and Brothers, 1962), 430–31.
[14] See Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1991); Lowrie, Kierkegaard, 457; and Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven,” Merry England 15, no. 87 (July 1890): 163–68.
[15] See Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Ashgate, 2001); Brackley, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola (Crossroad Publishing, 2004), especially 101, who writes, “How much should we have? Better to reframe the question: Do we feel at home among the poor? Do they feel comfortable in our homes?”; and Griswold, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). And note that in a discussion of this issue with incarcerated students at East Jersey State Prison, they made it very clear that they would be unimpressed with the grand gesture of my giving away all I had to the poor if that was the alternative to using my economic status to leverage power to change policies and structures to benefit the poor. Food for thought.