f="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080325.cfm">Readings for 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Ecclesiastes 1:1-2, 2:21-23; Psalm 90 3-6, 13, 14, 17; Colossians 3: 1-5, 9-11; Luke 12: 13-21
I've recently been invited to join the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJ A). It's a new progressive think-and-action movement designed to offer a coordinated, long-term alternative to the far right's increasingly authoritarian agenda.
No doubt you've heard of the Republican Project 2025. Backed by the Heritage Foundation and other major right-wing institutions, it's a blueprint for seizing executive power, dismantling federal regulatory structures, militarizing domestic politics, and further entrenching white Christian nationalism. It is as serious as it is terrifying.
The Arc of Justice Alliance is our answer. It recognizes a hard truth: for over 50 years, the U.S. right has invested billions into building a machine-- media networks, policy mills, judicial pipelines, and ideological training camps for candidates. Progressives, by contrast, have often been merely defensive, scattered and uncoordinated. That's changing now. AJA is bringing together scholars, activists, spiritual leaders, artists, and organizers to craft a long-term vision for democratic justice, human rights, and environmental sanity.
But here's something that may surprise you: one of the right's most potent weapons has been theology.
The Republican machine has spent decades coopting the Judeo-Christian tradition, turning it into a moral fig leaf for capitalism, nationalism, and even genocidal violence. Faith has been hijacked-- not just by televangelists, but by policy strategists who know how powerful religion can be in shaping hearts and winning votes.
The results? A public religion that celebrates guns over peace, capitalism over compassion, and settler colonialism-- in Palestine and elsewhere-- over human dignity.
As a liberation theologian, I've been invited by AJA to help reclaim the authentic Judeo-Christian tradition. To rescue the voices of the prophets-- from Moses to Jesus to Paul-- from those who've turned them into champions of empire. We're done letting Jesus be portrayed as a flag-waving American whose top moral priorities are deregulated markets, gun rights, and misogyny.
This week's liturgical readings couldn't be more timely. They mock the cult of wealth accumulation and call for spiritual liberation from materialist obsession. Ecclesiastes calls it "vanity" to work endlessly, lose sleep over your earnings, and die before enjoying anything. Psalm 90 reminds us life is brief-- we might not wake up tomorrow. Paul tells us to set our minds on things beyond consumerism, and Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke, outright laughs at the man who builds bigger barns while ignoring his soul.
These aren't just pious musings. They're indictments.
They expose what capitalism demands of us: exhaustion, anxiety, competition, disconnection. They also expose what it consistently fails to deliver: peace, community, purpose, or justice.
Here's the deeper issue: capitalism isn't just an economy-- it's a theology. It teaches that your worth is your wealth. That you are alone, in competition, in a world of scarcity. That power, not compassion, is what keeps you safe. That "salvation" is financial security.
But the deeper tradition-- the one the AJA seeks to reclaim-- teaches something radically different.
It teaches that our lives matter not for what we earn, but for how we love. That justice, not greed, is the heartbeat of the universe. That our deepest wealth is found in community. That joy is a collective act of resistance.
And crucially, it teaches that we must name and dismantle the systems-- economic, political, and religious-- that keep us enslaved to fear and false gods.
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