Some bits I highlighted from various articles in Gesher, the current Journal of the Council of Christians and Jews (Victoria) Inc. (5 November 2014).

To save cluttering this article with sources, if you’re interested, contact the CCJ office (www.ccjvic.org.au) for a copy: good investment!

PS. I have an article in this issue on Same-Sex Marriage

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* The ‘knowledge doubling curve’ currently (but not for long) sits around every twelve months.

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* There is only one (politically correct?) rule: no one should in any circumstances be hurt or feel offended.

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* Talk of racial purity is a reinscription of the ‘noble savage’/Garden of Eden fantasy so beloved of Romantics and Nazis alike. Colonists – usually from Europe - hate only one kind of people more than the ‘blacks’ – and that is the ‘coloureds’… From the 1850s until the 1990s the public imagination in Australia was dominated by a great silence about the stealing of Aboriginal land… But Manning Clark and later Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds began to contest the false versions of history so beloved of those whose wealth and power had been founded on lies. (Part-aboriginal Rev. Dr. Garry Deverell).

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* The religious tradition of Christendom was woven into colonial racism (in the US, Australia, South Africa etc.) – the same tradition that motivated those who joined cause with Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the Christian aboriginal leader in Australia, Douglas Nicholls, to address the injustices of the past.

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* Leviticus 26:40 suggests that we should confess our iniquity and the iniquity of our ancestors… All non-indigenous people are beneficiaries of historic dispossession in some measure. (Jews are strictly forbidden from destroying fruit trees – even if they have been won in a war).

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*  In Australia over 740,000 renting households experience financial hardship. Over 1.6 million working age people (13.5%) have either no work, or want more work than they have.

* French economist Thomas Piketty has pointed to the re-emergence of a new form of ‘patrimonial capitalism’ in post industrial societies. Powerful minority interest groups advocate successfully for policies to support their own interests. This is most obvious in the area of tax reform: successive governments have refused to undertake much needed reforms to the tax system (eg., in Australia, as recommended in the Henry Review).

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* [In various parts of the world] people suffer unimaginable abuse – from the commercial trade involving the rape of children through to workers who can expect to be murdered by their employers when their usefulness is seen to be at an end.

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* There are 50,000 brick-kilns in India, each employing an average 100 permanent male workers. Including women, brick-kilns employ 10 million workers in India.

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* In Australia, nearly one in three women has experienced physical violence. Almost one in five women has been the victim of sexual assault. One woman is killed almost every week by a current or former intimate partner.

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* It costs Australian taxpayers $3744 per day for each man, woman and child held in offshore detention centres. UNCHR: Australia took one refugee per 1,000 population, ranking 69th in the world for per capita refugee intake. In 2012, in terms of absolute refugee intake, Australia took nearly 30,000 refugees and ranked 49th in the world. Asylum seeker advocate Julian Burnside QC has proposed that the entire state of Tasmania be declared an immigration processing centre.

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* Fear of persecution mainly due to race, politics and religion remains the main reason leading millions to flee their usual habitats, seeking safety in strange societies.

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* The MS St.Louis was a ship filled with 915 Jewish German passengers who were seeking asylum in 1939. Cuba and America both shut their doors to the passengers; the ship returned to Europe. Almost a third of the passengers were eventually killed in Nazi concentration camps…

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* Elie Wiesel: ‘I swear never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.’

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* ‘Dialogue is born from an attitude of respect for the other person, from a conviction that the other person has something good to say. It assumes that there is room in the heart for the person’s point of view, opinion and proposal. To dialogue entails a cordial reception, not a prior condemnation. In order to dialogue, it is necessary to know how to lower the defences, open the doors of the house, and offer human warmth’ (Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis).

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* The Meaning of  ‘Marriage’: ‘We [need to] differentiate the role of multiplying as Genesis 1 urges, and becoming one in companionship and sexual union as Genesis 2 models. This has changed marriage to the extent that some now marry just for companionship and shared intimacy, even some who are still of childbearing age’.

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* ‘”Reparation therapy” is the umbrella term for various aversion techniques designed to repair or to “fix” gay people. The American Psychiatric Association considers this therapy illegitimate, and the recidivism rate for people who have gone through this therapy is about 98%, which does not encourage faith in the system’

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* “It is not good for the human being (ho-adam) to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). If it is not good for a person to be alone, why… would we condemn gay people to lives of singleness and celibacy?’

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* ‘There is ample evidence to show that children raised by same-gender parents fare as well as those raised by heterosexual parents’ (American Academy of Pediatrics)

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* ‘What to do with a law like this one? “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” (Leviticus 20:13). Most quoters stop there, but it goes on: “They shall be put to death”. Seriously, if the first half of that verse is divinely-inspired and authoritative, who are we moderns to decide that the second half is not? The same goes for other death penalty cases’…  ‘Matthew 15:1-20 and Mark 7:1-23 give Jesus’ most extended teaching… [where he] outlines how unquestioning adherence to traditional teaching, even biblical teaching can end up contravening the will of God.

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‘The biblical stories of Jesus and Peter interacting with outcasts lead tot he conclusion that we must be spending time with [such] people before we are in a position to adequately hear what the Spirit might be saying to us through the Scriptures’

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‘On humility: Love work, and despise official positions, and do not become too acquainted with the governing power’.

More on Social Justice: How to Know the Lord .