Shalom Ethics
Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself
- Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
- Publisher: Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2026
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Publisher's Description
Obedience to Jesus's second love command yields a life characterized by such practices as voluntary poverty, communal living, shared life with marginalized people, Gandhian nonviolence, and refusal to participate in the violence of the state. Shalom Ethics offers an exposition of the second love command. The command is best read as an injunction to pursue neighbor inclusion in shalom, the state of a community in which the sustenance, safety, freedom, and dignity of all are secure. Thomas Crisp takes up the question of what normative ethical theory is suggested by the command and related love teachings in the Jesus tradition, the investigation of which yields the book's focal love ethic. He then extrapolates from that ethic, using a combination of biblical and philosophical arguments, to arrive at an ethics of nonviolence, Christian anarchism, open borders, prison abolition, anticapitalism, and voluntary poverty. Loving your neighbor as yourself has implications for living a more radical style of Christian discipleship. Shalom Ethics explores the theory and praxis of the early Jesus movement as a model and suggests what this might look like today.
Endorsements (7)
“Jesus's life and ministry are an unveiling of reality, which at its core means an exposure to God's merciful and just heart for all the vulnerable. What Tom Crisp beautifully and transformatively conveys here is the way this revelation has cracked open his own experience of this love and, even more, drawn him in communion with others toward those at the cultural margins who, in fact, dwell in the heart of God. This changes everything.”
“When it comes to love, Christians too often turn to sentimentality or platitudes. Thomas Crisp moves beyond both to offer us an interpretation of love as shalom that's both intellectually rigorous and deeply grounded in biblical tradition. Not content with limiting himself to analysis, Crisp also offers practicable reflections about shalom love in relation to state power, geopolitical borders, and economic structures. Truly a book to stimulate the mind and inspire practical action.”
“Shalom Ethics: Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself is a magisterial exploration of the implications for life today of the biblical injunction "Love your neighbor as yourself." The author anticipates that readers will regard a good many of the conclusions at which he arrives with an "incredulous stare." For this reader, quite right he is. Can the love command really imply the abolition of prisons? Can it really imply not voting and paying as little tax as possible? On and on. Crisp's bracing conclusions are so compellingly argued, however, that over and over, the incredulous stare morphs into the eye of enlightenment.”
“Like the author himself, Shalom Ethics is a profound gift. It is nothing less than a comprehensive development and defense of the project of grounding Christian ethics in love. But it is much more than this too. It is, at once, a work of first-rate moral philosophy and a gut-churning, mind-bending, goose-bumping prophetic vision. Those paying attention know that Crisp is among the most penetrating thinkers of his generation. The combination of this level of philosophical precision with such deeply humane and vulnerable moral sensitivities is vanishingly rare. Says Crisp, the way of Jesus is the way of a richly coherent but morally demanding agape. And the demands are going to be surprising too. Still, the beauty of the way comes through--and leaves us wondering if maybe, just maybe, we might risk taking it up. Pulling things together, this is a bracing book, both intellectually and morally. No one will walk away from a fair-minded read of it without a limp. Can a book that leaves you with a limp also be a gift? Yes, yes, it can be.”
“Tom Crisp's Shalom Ethics is my favorite sort of book--the sort in which the only thing more exciting than wrestling with its soul-making challenges is imagining the provocative and healing ferment it may generate--in journals, books, and classrooms (for sure!), but also and more importantly in the lives of radically loving people yearning to bring the peace that passes understanding into the meanest streets of human experience. Agree or disagree with Crisp's often demanding conclusions, but you cannot escape this book without an exceedingly more rigorous and vastly expanded understanding of the transformational power of love and the deep joy its votaries can realize in their lives and communities.”
“This book is a passionate argument and invitation to us all to embrace radical discipleship. Catholic Workers--and everyone who takes the demands of Christian love seriously--will read and share this book with gratitude.”
“The Scriptures meant a very specific thing in the context of their time. For most Christians of conscience, the challenge is not in understanding what Christ demanded, but in believing it and seeing its value enough to put it into practice. With humility, it is helpful, valuable even, every now and again, to bring those teachings into the specifics of our day. Dr. Crisp's Shalom Ethics helps us unpack the specificity of the love Christ calls us to, the value in choosing to be faithful to it, and ways to put it into practice right now. Each segment of Dr. Crisp's book is teeming with insight, invitation, and inspiration. All of these warrant profound individual and community interrogation to be fully incorporated into the lives of those bold enough to declare Jesus as the Way.”
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