And activist Lindsey Paris-Lopez comments on the powerful resonance of the Sermon on the Mount in our current political and moral emergency: Jesus’s lessons in the Beatitudes and throughout the Sermon on the Mount seem so far removed from our national ethos. We refuse to acknowledge the deep, systemic racism and violence at the core of our cultural consciousness all the while touting our exceptionalism. . . . The Sermon on the Mount is a call to resistance . . . it uproots and overturns a conventional order built on and maintained by violence.4
