Reading reading reading.

That's what I've been doing for the last few hours. You see, my Religious Studies classes have tests every week based on the assigned readings, so you have to do them! Fortunately, the readings are usually quite interesting. I just wish they weren't so long. As I take a little break from this activity, I thought I'd share a few snippets...

This piece is from a chapter of Christopher D. Marshall's book, Beyond Retribution:
"Having been set free from slavery to sin, Christians have become slaves to God's liberating righteousness and are to offer themselves to God as 'instruments of righteousness (Romans 6:13), vehicles of restorative justice in God's afflicted world. Applied to the realm of criminal justice, this means taking evil seriously, holding wrongdoers to account and summoning their repentance, as God does with Israel (Rom. 1-2). It also means refusing to deny our relationship with wrongdoers, refusing to abandon them or exclude them entirely from the human community, just as God remains steadfastly loyal to his sinful people (Rom. 3). It means, further, seeing criminals not solely as perpetrators of evil, though indeed they are that, but also as victims of the crushing power of sin, from which they are in need of liberation and renewal. And it means not regarding their punishment per se as the satisfaction of justice. Punishment may be necessary... but it is not the pain of punishment itself that achieves justice, as though justice resides in creating an equity of suffering, the pain of the offenders' punishments compensating for the pain inflicted on victims. True justice resides in the restoring of relationships and the recreation of shalom (Rom. 5). It is only when the cycle of evil is broken and, as far is possible, the consequences of criminal action remedied, consequences which blight the lives of both crime victims and their abusers -- only then is true justice, the justice modeled by God, attained in measure."

Something to think about!

And then, this one is from Virginia Wiles' book, Making Sense of Paul:
"God's goal for the cosmos is shalom -- peace. Peace can be described as the absence of enmity: The lion and the lamb lie down together (Isa 11:6); warring humans 'beat their swords into ploughshares" (Isa 2:4). Stated positively, shalom is that existence in which everything fits together -- a good place for everything, and everything in its place. Shalom is order; it is right-relatedness; it is wholeness. Shalom is the integrity of the whole -- of the whole created cosmos, of everything that is."