Compassionate Justice Quotes

“Nothing is said about the need to catch and punish the offenders (most muggers never get caught anyway); all emphasis is placed on the need to restore and heal the victim.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“When Jesus concludes the parable by asking the lawyer, “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the one who fell among robbers?” (v. 36), he is indicating that the question, “Who is my neighbor?” is really a victim’s question, which can only be answered from a victim’s point of view.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“It seems clear from the wider gospel tradition that Jesus considered love to have hermeneutical precedence in the interpretation of the Torah and to be the lodestar for his own activity,12 and, as T. W. Manson observes, in the oral culture of the day, “the only way of publishing great thoughts was to go on repeating them in talk and sermons.”13”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“Significantly, “compassion” in Luke’s Gospel is used only of God (1:78, cf. 1:50, 54) and of Jesus (7:13), and of the two most extraordinary parabolic characters of all: the father of the Prodigal Son (15:20) and the Good Samaritan (10:33).21”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth . . . and say: “This is not just.” . . . A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of spiritual uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“Compassion is a manifestation of the relationality that binds people together in community and that constitutes the very essence of their humanity.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“The best vantage point for clarifying one’s moral responsibility when harm has occurred is in the dirt and blood alongside the wounded party, not at the safe distance of a detached jurist debating the details of the relevant legislation.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“True insight comes from standing in solidarity with victims.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“Charity must be accompanied by efforts at structural and systemic transformation.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice

“What social justice requires, King assumes, cannot be discerned in the abstract from the safe distance of a policy analyst or an academic theorist. It can only be found by looking at the actual, embodied suffering of the victims of oppression and injustice, and questioning the structural arrangements that perpetuate their suffering.”
― Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice