Social Justice

Critical theory and its expression in fields such as critical race theory, critical pedagogy, and queer theory are having a profound impact on our culture. Contemporary critical theory's ideas about race, class, gender, identity, and justice have dramatically shaped how people think, act, and view one another—in Christian and secular spheres alike. In Critical Dilemma, authors Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer illuminate the origins and influences of contemporary critical theory, considering it in the light of clear reason and biblical orthodoxy.

Transportation planners, engineers, and policymakers in the United States face the monumental task of righting the wrongs of their predecessors while charting the course for the next generation. This task requires empathy while pushing against forces in the industry that are resistant to change. How do you change a system that was never designed to be equitable? How do you change a system that continues to divide communities? In Inclusive Transportation, expert Veronica O. Davis shines a light on the inequitable and often destructive practice of transportation planning and engineering.

It is commonly thought in secular society that the Bible is one of the greatest hindrances to doing justice. Isn't it full of regressive views? Didn't it condone slavery? Why look to the Bible for guidance on how to have a more just society? But Timothy Keller sees it another way. In Generous Justice, Keller explores a life of justice empowered by an experience of grace: a generous, gracious justice. Here is a book for believers who find the Bible a trustworthy guide as well as those who suspect that Christianity is a regressive influence in the world.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In the 1970s, many campus radicals raised in Christian homes brought neo-Marxist ideas from college back to church with them. At first, figures like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Richard Mouw made great gains for their progressive evangelical cause. But, after the defeat of Jimmy Carter, the religious right stole the headlines. Today, a new crop of mainstream evangelicals has taken up the cause of the New Left, whether they know it or not.

For the last 60 years, fear has seeped into every area of American life: Americans own more guns than citizens of any other country, sequester themselves in gated communities, and retreat from public spaces. And yet, crime rates have plummeted, making life in America safer than ever. Why, then, are Americans so afraid - and where does this fear lead to? In this remarkable work of social history, May demonstrates how our obsession with security has made citizens fear each other and distrust the government, making America less safe and less democratic.

Paul Hawken has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and centuries of hidden history.

Restorative justice represents "a paradigm shift in the way Americans conceptualize and administer punishment," says author Maisha T. Winn, from a focus on crime to a focus on harm, including the needs of both those who were harmed and those who caused it.

When your work is inextricable from your identity, your community, and your own liberation, you need a unique praxis of care to sustain it—and for mission-driven activists, organizers, and changemakers working under oppressive systems, making space to center vital needs like rest, self-care, and healthy boundaries isn’t as simple as clocking out. Practicing Liberation reorients collective justice work toward a model that transforms the effects of injustice, harm, and oppressive systems into resilience, joy, and community care.

Against enormous odds and in the face of fierce pushback, the Palestine solidarity movement has succeeded in transforming the landscape of American politics. In this book, two key leaders and former staff of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) focus on the important role of anti-Zionist Jewish organizing within the broader Palestine solidarity movement, reflecting on their decade of leadership of JVP and drawing lessons especially relevant to those organizing from a position of solidarity.

For more than fifty years, a power plant in the small town of Kingston, Tennessee,  burned fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, gradually creating a mountain of ashen waste sixty feet high and covering eighty-four acres, contained only by an earthen embankment. In 2008, just before Christmas, that embankment broke, unleashing a lethal wave of coal sludge that covered three hundred acres, damaged nearly thirty homes, and precipitating a cleanup effort that would cost more than a billion dollars—and the lives of more than fifty cleanup workers who inhaled the toxins it released.

Reimagining James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century text The Last of the Mohicans from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga’a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonial violence, Jordan Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling.

Temperatures are rising all over the world, leading to wildfires, droughts, animal extinctions, and ferocious storms - climate change is real. But how did we get to this state, and what can we do next? What if we could work to protect the planet, while also taking action to make life fairer and more equal for the people who live on it? We can - if we're willing to change everything.

Through poverty, adolescence, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley Ford wishes she could turn to her father for hope and encouragement. There are just a few problems: he’s in prison, and she doesn’t know what he did to end up there. She doesn’t know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates.

An inspiring personal story of redemption, second chances, and the transformative power within us all, from the founder and CEO of the nonprofit charity: water. In the tradition of such best-selling books as Shoe Dog and Mountains Beyond Mountains, Thirst is a riveting account of how to build a better charity, a better business, a better life - and a gritty tale that proves it’s never too late to make a change.

Addressing mission, evangelism, and social justice, two pastors draw listeners to the Bible's teaching on some contentious matters. Listeners in all spheres of ministry will grow in their understanding of the mission of the Church and gain a renewed sense of urgency for Jesus' call to preach the Word and make disciples.

In 1982, at the height of Guatemala’s civil war, 20 soldiers from the army’s commando unit, called the Kaibiles, invaded the farming village of Dos Erres. Masquerading as leftist guerillas, the squad members cut their way through the small town, killing more than 250 men, women, and children. Only a handful of people survived. One of them, a young boy, was adopted by Kaibil lieutenant Ramrez and raised by Ramrez’s family, who named him Oscar. Just three years old at the time of the massacre, Oscar grew up unaware of his true origins. It wasn’t until almost 30 years later, living in the suburbs of Boston with a family of his own, that Oscar would learn the truth.

Rulers throughout history have used laws to impose order. But laws were not simply instruments of power and social control. They also offered ordinary people a way to express their diverse visions for a better world. Oxford scholar Fernanda Pirie traces the rise and fall of the sophisticated legal systems underpinning ancient empires and religious traditions, while also showing how common people - tribal assemblies, merchants, farmers - called on laws to define their communities, regulate trade, and build civilizations.

Hailed by Time as one of the world's hundred most influential people, Jeffrey D. Sachs is renowned for his work around the globe advising economies in crisis. Now a classic of its genre, The End of Poverty distills more than 30 years of experience to offer a uniquely informed vision of the steps that can transform impoverished countries into prosperous ones. Sachs lays out a clear conceptual map of the world economy. In this 10th anniversary edition, Sachs presents an extensive new foreword assessing the progress of the past decade.

From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.