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, , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.In this video, I talk about:
US VP J.D. Vance’s claim that Americans should immigration policy through the lens of ordo amoris, an Augustian notion of an order of loves, which Rory Stewart called “pagan / tribal.”
What I’ve been up to.
Forthcoming book projects.
My recent videos about Mike Winger on women in the church.
On the one hand, Vance is right that we elect governments to look after the national interests, to take care of their own people. Plus, Democrats don’t seem to love their Trump-voting neighbors all that much and they perhaps have neglected their local work-impoverished communities in the rush to look after undocumented immigrants, something Black and Hispanic leaders have noted! And did not the apostle Paul say, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal 6:10)? Big emphasis on one’s own family and church community at the end.
On the other, Jesus never told us to rank our neighbors in terms of a triage of love. In fact, in some cases, Jesus said doing God’s will was more important than obligations to family (see Luke 9:57-62 or Mark 3:20-31, 10:29-31). Plus, if the parable of the Good Samaritan is anything to go by, looking after foreigners does rank pretty high on Jesus’s example of what constitutes loving one’s neighbour!
I like what Graham Tomlin said about the Vance/Stewart spat:
The problem comes when we think of love as like a kind of cake. There are only so many slices of cake and you have to be careful who you give them out to because sooner or later they will run out. In this way of thinking, love is a limited commodity where you have to be sparing who you love, because there isn't enough to go round.
Yet divine love is a bit more like fire. When you take a light from a candle and light another candle with it, the first candle is not diminished, but continues to burn brightly. Fire can be passed on from one place to another and spread widely because it's not finite in the way that a cake is.
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