Ten Theology Books to Watch For – August 2024

To Love Our Neighbors: Radical Practices in Solidarity, Sufficiency, and Sustainability

Joe Blosser

( Orbis Books )

In a world where “neighbor” has become as meaningless as a “friend” or “follower” online, this book shows how true neighbor love is the long-term work of forming and maintaining more just communities.

In To Love Our Neighbors activist and ethicist Joe Blosser weaves together resources in theology, community development, economics, anti-racism, and environmental sustainability to help community leaders, organizations, students, churches, and neighborhoods embrace solidarity for change. Even with the best intentions many current practices of loving our neighbors often do more harm than good.

Offering new practices of neighbor love, Blosser guides us to live in solidarity with others across our differences, exercise sufficiency in our economic lives, and care for the sustainability of our planet and communities. When we engage in these practices, we foster the shared sense of common good, mutual responsibility, and interconnectedness that Jesus intended.

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Poverty in the Promised Land: Neighborliness, Resistance, and Restoration

Walter Brueggemann

( Fortress Press )

This book provides biblical evidence of the structural and systemic factors that have long been part of the story of poverty. The people of God have often denied such structural claims in favor of the belief that individuals are poor because of personal choice. This absolves the social institutions of society, including the church, from responsibility to address these structural forces, including within the church itself. Charity and benevolence become the antidote for such a diagnosis of poverty, rather than the deeply rooted change that God intended for the Year of Jubilee and that the early church reflected. This book supports the biblical mandate of neighborliness as both a personal and a corporate response to systemic poverty, a mandate that is the second of the two great commandments.

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