James Talarico

It was the center of not just religious power, but economic power and political power that

And so this humble rabbi from the backwoods in the Galilee doesn't just stay in his room and pray when his neighbors are being hurt.

He walks into the seat of power and he flips over the tables of the money changers, the tables of injustice.

And it's a profound act of protest, of civil disobedience.

It's ultimately what gets him killed by the Roman Empire.

And I and many others, we always think about Jesus being gentle and kind and soft, all those things he was.

But he was also strong and tough and confrontational and aggressive.

when people were being hurt.

And at least for me, and I think for this country, we have to remember that that is what love demands of us sometimes.

And so I wanted to center that story when we started the campaign, because this campaign was gonna be about fighting back.

The billionaires who own our algorithms, who own our cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens and keeping us all divided.

This was gonna be a campaign that was gonna bring people together to stand up

to those forces.

Who were the money changers?

We were talking earlier about religion being corrupted.

Folks who were going to the temple sometimes had to make sacrifices and part of that ritual.

And so the money changers were allowing them to participate in that temple economy and in the process getting rich off of those people.

This is, again, partly why we are so focused on trying to keep these traditions sacred, because in this case, the money changers are profiting off of people's search for the sacred.

And it's what we're called to challenge directly, just like Jesus did in the first century.

I just mentioned the billionaires who own the algorithms and the news networks.