One Scripture, two very different responses to the existence of serious deprivation in society. In the initial set of readings in this chapter, John Dominic Crossan, a Roman Catholic theologian; Michael Lerner, now a rabbi; J. Philip Wogaman, a Methodist minister; the U.S. Catholic bishops in a 1986 pastoral letter; and Shane Claiborne, an evangelical former seminarian, all ground in Scripture a strongly egalitarian approach to the question of distributive justice. As you read these excerpts and the significantly differing ones that follow them, consider these questions:

1. (a) To what extent are you inclined to assign the worldview manifested in the scriptural passages invoked to the domain of “politics,” where we are all presumably free to choose up sides as we think best, rather than to “religion,” where (if one takes Scripture seriously) the implications of its language presumably have more of a “bite”?

2. […]