James Talarico

You can't love God and bully the outcast.

We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image.

In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God.

The commandment to love God and love neighbor is not from Christianity.

It is from Judaism.

And all Jesus is clarifying as kind of a radical rabbi is that neighbor is the person you love the least.

The parable of the Good Samaritan, maybe the most famous of Jesus's parables, I think we forget in our modern context how shocking it was.

Because today, being a good Samaritan just means helping people on the side of the road, which is good.

You should do that.

But for Jesus' listeners in the first century, the Samaritans were not just a different religious group.

The Samaritans were their sworn enemies.

And so he is pushing the boundaries on how we define neighbor and who we're supposed to love.

Loving our enemies...

Again, it's become trite in a culture dominated by Christianity, but none of us actually do that.

None of us actually love our enemies, even if we say we try to.

And so I share the same revulsion that Christians in halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process.

What do you think of that?

I think she's partially right.

If you read the Sermon on the Mount, again, I think Jesus should have a say in what Christianity means.

In that sermon, he is the ultimate conservative and the ultimate progressive at the same time.