My wise-for-his-18-years son took a look at the draft of my About page for this newsletter and asked, “What do you mean by justice?”
Like most of his questions, I thought it deserved a good response, and I thought you’d like to know, too.
The most concise explanation I’ve found of justice comes from Paul Wadell’s book on Christian ethics. I read his chapter on justice with a group of faculty as we were writing a book together, and we liked Wadell’s writing so much we decided to dedicate our book to him (shameless plug—check it out!) Here’s a summary of Wadell’s take on justice.
Justice involves everybody you know… and everybody you don’t know. Justice happens when people live “in right relationship with God, with friends and family, with coworkers or community members, with anyone [they] may come into contact with, with persons on the other side of the world, and with the natural world.” He goes on, “Justice is relevant to every relationship, to every situation and circumstance of life, because no setting exists in which we do not have to take into account our relationships with others.” In other words, you won’t have any shortage of realms in which to apply a newsletter about justice.
Injustice is the “prevalent condition.” Justice doesn’t happen on its own. As we learn justice, we restore, reconcile, redistribute, remake. Justice requires intentional undoing and redoing.
Justice happens in your already existing relationships. Here’s one of my favorite Wadell quotes: “Justice does not create a bond between us and others; it recognizes and honors a bond that is already there.” Your life already affects people of other races, nations, abilities, and institutions. It’s not up to you to choose whether your life makes a difference to others. It’s up to you to choose what difference you make. Will it be just?
Justice is interpersonal and also way bigger. Justice happens at the level of one individual to another (what Wadell calls commutative justice), and also at the level of the structures, institutions, and policies that address the needs of a whole society and the world (what he calls social justice). My main research project right now is about racial justice, which is realm in which we need both interpersonal and social justice. In this newsletter I want to deal with the whole gamut of justice—you and your bestie, you and your school board, you and the Mongolian woman you never met, you and the arctic tundra.
Justice is founded on the dignity of all beings. Why care about justice? Because all humans and all the universe have dignity. Maybe you have another foundation for that dignity, but for me, I ground it on a believe that a Creator God made the universe all out of love and it’s not mine to disrespect.
Justice is modeled on a story. I know some of you readers aren’t believers in the God of the Bible, and Christianity might bring up an icky taste, but I hope you’ll stay with me as I’m honest here—for me the ultimate model of justice is the Christian story. As Wadell puts it, “What Christians think about justice primarily comes not from theories about justice but from a story.” God creates and sustains a glorious universe, God intervenes when people experience injustice like enslavement (the Exodus story), and God became human as Jesus not only to forgive individual sins but to declare a social and political restoration of God’s justice and peace.
All that to say, justice is big. It’s beautiful, it’s difficult, and it’s worth it. I’m grateful to join you in the journey of making it happen.