Dean Kamen’s Solution to the World’s Water Problems

In the News: There is a lot of buzz surrounding the water-purifying machine that Segway inventor Dean Kamen demonstrated on the Colbert Report recently (clip below). Everyone has been trying to find out more about his claim that “you stick a hose into anything that looks wet … and it comes out … as perfect distilled clean water.” So far, it looks like it is all true.
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Contribute to the TJL Fund

Support justice initiatives being lived out around the world by contributing the TJL Fund. Join our community of donors whose hearts are devoted to investing in the passions and ingenuity of dedicated Christians who are transforming both lives and societies. Your donations will support The Just Life and be connected directly with passionate daily practitioners and social entrepreneurs who advance the gospel. Visit the donations page through the page link in the top menu bar.

Announcing Fellowship Forums!

Notice a new page link in the top menu bar: A fundamental development goal for The Just Life community is the creation of “professional fellowships” within local communities in order to work through how to use specific gifts and callings to live a life of love and justice. In an effort to facilitate those discussions, provide a collaborative space, and generate a knowledge bank, we have created online forums. It may take some time to get these conversations going, so spread the word and join in!

Write For Us!

The Just Life is meant to be a collaborative space. As our community and content grows we are always looking for passionate writers to bring issues, organizations, and solutions to our attention.

Bring up important issues. Explore what it looks like to live a just life — with our prayers, with our giving, with our purchases, with our vote, with our voice, in our minds, in our homes, in our community, in our city and globally.

Share your story! Everyone’s journey to and through the difficult issues of biblical justice is unique — we want to hear your story. How has God opened your eyes to justice and compassion? What life choices have you made in response? What are the questions you are wrestling with? What do you think it looks like to live a “just life?”

If you have any insight beyond what you can share by merely commenting on a post please send your article idea to contact@thejustlife.org. Challenge and inspire us towards daily practical responses to God’s heart for justice.

12 Principles for a Just Society

12 Principles for a Just Society, an excerpt from Just Generosity by Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action:

1. Made in the image of God, every person enjoys an inalienable dignity and worth that society must respect.
2. Persons are not just complex socioeconomic, materialistic machines: they are also spiritual beings enjoying God given rights and responsibilities. Each person is a body-soul unity made for relationship with God, neighbor, and earth.
3. Because the Trinitarian God created persons for mutual interdependence in community, society must be organized in ways that nurture the common good. Since persons reach their potential only in multi-layered community of diverse institutions (family, church, school, media, business, government), society must promote policies (consistent with religious freedom for all) that strengthen all institutions to play their full proper roll.
4. Every policy, both public and private, must be measured by its impact on the poor and marginalized because biblical faith teaches that one of the central criterion by which God judges societies is how they treat the least advantaged.
5. Both because God wants all persons to be dignified participants in their communities and because centralized power is always dangerous, we must strengthen the economic and political power of the poor.
6. Renewing the family must be a central goal for both government and civil society. (A family is that set of persons related by marriage, blood, or adoption.) While recognizing that today’s families come in many shapes (two-parent, single-parent, blended), all policies, both public and private, should promote the biblical norm of mother and father (united in lifelong marital covenant) with their children, surrounded by a larger extended family.
7. Every Person and family should have the opportunity to acquire and use (without discrimination based on religion, race, or gender) the productive resources that, if used responsibility, will enable that person or family to earn a decent living and be a dignified participating member of the community.
8. Everyone able to work has an obligation to do so, and society, where possible, has the responsibility to make work opportunities available to all. Everyone who works responsibly should receive a living income.
9. Society should care – in a generous, compassionate way that strengthens dignity and respect – for those who cannot care for themselves.
10. Quality education must be available to all, regardless of family income.
11. Quality heath care consistent with society’s present knowledge and resources must be available to all, regardless of family income.
12. Every community must enjoy public safety. Communities should be places where people feel physically secure, violence is rare, and the police and courts function without bias for or against anyone.

We must, as the Call to Renewal covenant insists, stop making false choices “between good values and good jobs, between personal responsibility and social justice, between rebuilding families and rebuilding neighborhoods, between sexual restraint and educational opportunity, between good parenting and livable family wages, between individual moral choices and government responsibility. Every institution in society must do its share and each one must do what it does best.”

Supply Side Jesus

I came across a comic commentary entitled “The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus,” and to be honest, I am not sure what I think about it. “Supply side” refers to supply side economics, and for those who have been around the justice conversation for a while the strip hits a bit close to home. Is what is referred to as “supply side Jesus” the daily practical response to justice issues some are proposing? Does this strip simply take unfair shots from the other side of a political/religious perspective? Can you embrace supply side principles of economic development without buying into a “prosperity gospel?” For that matter, what do you think about a gospel of prosperity? The entire comic is copied below:
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Social Justice

Social Justice
by Raymond Aitchison
First published in ALERT issue 8 April 1991.

It is a pity that the response of some evangelical Christians towards issues of social justice and social concern has been so often negative. To some extent this has been a reaction against the emphasis placed in “liberal” circles upon the so-called “social gospel” at the expense of the Biblical Gospel of justification by faith. This does not, however, justify a negative response, which avoids issues instead of facing them. Happily there is today a growing positive attitude among evangelicals towards social concern and social justice, an attitude for which we have outstanding examples in such eminent evangelicals as Wilberforce, Barnardo, George Muller and William Quarrier.

There is no doubt whatever about the clear Biblical injunctions that impose a social responsibility upon the Christian, and especially a concern for the poor and underprivileged (as e.g. in James 2:14-16 and 1John 3:17, and numerous passages in the Old Testament). These do not, however, require us to follow headlong in the train of every person or organization or body of opinion that claims to be promoting social justice. Not only has God clearly imposed social concern upon us in the Scriptures, but in them He has also given us guidelines to direct us.

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