Sometimes we deceive ourselves into thinking we are following Jesus faithfully when we are in fact enriching ourselves and gaining in status and being more faithful to institutions or economies or corporations that look nice, and seem nice, and even feel nice - while contributing to injustice. And so, alongside this challenging and confusing way of life we have chosen as followers of Jesus, we have practices that shape our lives to be more and more like Jesus - more and more into deacons and doulas instead of kings and pawns.

Howard Thurman taught that the way to change external society was to change one’s internal reality. He was gracious, intellectual, humble, well-read and well-traveled. To know him better, I suggest we all pick up a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited, which changed my view of my responsibility to love like Jesus and my reaction to a variety of issues that seem to press against us all from before and behind. Published in 1949, this book shows that Jesus taught the oppressed people of his time a faith-based unconditional love that would enable them to endure their oppression and have agency in how they responded, in how they lived life more and more like Jesus.