Othering and the Paradox of Neighbor Love
A Review of
Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love can Heal our World
Andrew DeCort
Paperback: IVP Academic, 2025
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Reviewed by Marianne Abel-Lipschutz
Andrew DeCort’s latest book, Reviving the Golden Rule, explores the many reasons why we love or hate our neighbors. It’s an encyclopedia of the ways love wins. “Neighbor love is the core and culmination of God’s will for humanity,” DeCort believes. You can come back to this book repeatedly for encouragement, strategy, and lessons in the subtle ways we all fall short.
Building on literature of visionaries across faiths and centuries, DeCort traces human detours along with stories of nonviolent love and humility, transformational spiritual practices that change communities. “My hope is that this book can serve as a school for love and revive neighbor love as the most healing movement in human history.”
He has done his own fearless moral and ethical inventory and been transformed by devastating personal experiences to come to a truer sense of self as a passionate believer in Jesus. DeCort’s studies of the nuances of othering and dehumanization are insightful and are themselves devastating, as these warped beliefs shape the horrors we see today.
For example, he talks about how we dehumanize others – even parts of our own nature– and reject them with our words and actions. These habits of othering act as gateways to such behaviors as what philosopher Judith Butler named “ungrievability.” DeCort explained, “ungrievability means that if you’re grieving, I don’t care. Your pain doesn’t matter to me. What happens to you doesn’t matter. We begin to tolerate levels of suffering that are actually seen as necessary.”
Othering heightens the paradox of neighbor love. “When we see others as morally related to ourselves and equally worthy of love, the whole purpose of divine revelation has come to life in us. There is nothing more important than neighbor love for Christian ethics, and everything else flows in and out of it.”
In fact, there’s been a significant misunderstanding of what we call the Great Commission, DeCort asserts. “This final invitation from Jesus to continue his work on earth is all about neighbor love, baptism, and belovedness. It’s an invitation to actually embody and practice what he taught across every boundary of identity and difference… That’s not a list of doctrinal statements.”
“I’ve written this book to revive the dead dogma of neighbor love and to reawaken us to the living truth that it was since the beginning—a radical vision and practice of being human,” DeCort claims. “If that belovedness and that practice of radical love isn’t crossing every boundary like Jesus said, then we’re no longer extending the movement that Jesus launched.”
DeCort’s desire for honest witness inspired him to invite famous atheists to review his book. They commended it. “It was essential to me for the book to be tested, so I looked for someone who has deep disagreements with what I’m writing,” he explained. “I wanted someone to sniff it out and see, is this book actually talking about authentic neighbor love or is it still this pious game that Andrew is playing?”
This book is no intellectual game. It’s a serious endeavor, a remarkable work of scholarship, and a generous gift to all who want to live more fully and love the world into a better shape. “Neighbor love makes humanity shimmer and shine in full color like precious diamonds as if for the first time. How was it that I went through life and couldn’t see the glory all around and within me? I am born again, and neighbor love sets me free.” These words close his book, opening a new door for our collective future. Keep this mighty book handy in the days and years ahead.
Marianne Abel-Lipschutz
Marianne Abel-Lipschutz and her husband farm in Iowa and advocate for families in Guatemala. Her creative nonfiction narratives about faith and the humanities appeared recently in Panorama, Boulevard, Comment, and Front Porch Republic. Read her flash devotionals every three days at https://marianneabellipschutz.substack.com/
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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