Recently picked up Justo L. González' book, Faith and Wealth. I've been a fan of his since reading his two volume 'Story of Christianity' for my mdiv and was excited to get into this, as wealth — and its relationship to both society and faith — is something I think about a fair amount. I'm still in the first chapter, which is looking at several pre-Christian understandings of wealth and I wanted to note something that stood out while reading this morning.

While writing about property ownership, González mentions that a major difference between the Roman legal system and the Jewish one is that under the latter owners of the land were required to offer some of it to the poor. This was called the pe'ah (meaning corner) and included the edges of the field, any fruit that fell to the ground, and anything the harvesters left over after their first pass. There was significant debate over some of the applications of this, but the core of it was that the poor had actual rights to the land that superseded the rights of the owners.

This is a fascinating example to bring into conversations of wealth redistribution and the relationship between private and public; because here we have a public legal framework enforcing the stewardship of private property ownership in a way that upholds a social policy in favour of the poor. It isn't quite common ownership but perhaps more rooted in the idea that we never truly own the land, it is more of a gift that we can share with others.

Reading an article on the role of civil disobedience as a form of activism and why it's not as counterintuitive as the moderates would have you believe. The article cites a social psychologist named Colin Davis, who noted,

"The existence of a radical flank... seems to increase support for more moderate factions of a social movement, by making these factions appear less radical."

This is then backed up with studies done on other social movements, including both the women's movement and the civil rights movement in the twentieth century. The general point seems to be that acts of civil disobedience have a long and necessary history in advancing causes that seem more obvious today.

I think the key takeaway here is a reminder that centrism alone cannot make progressive change. It requires the existence of a more extreme version in order to help shake it out of complacency. So while many — in fact the vast majority — will denounce acts of civil disobedience as damaging the cause or targeting the wrong people, the opposite is actually true.

"For decades, society tolerated — even encouraged — public smoking. But then a growing awareness around public health risks associated with secondhand smoke, combined with harsher government regulations, led to a shift in public perception. The same could eventually hold true for driving."

From a 2023 article that provides a bit of a scientific basis for the notion of car-brain, or 'motonormativity' as it is referred to in the study referenced. The core idea here is that people are less tolerant of bad behaviour that doesn't involve a car. The challenge, according to the article, is that we don't currently look at driving through a public health lens. However, this seems to be changing, albeit slowly.

It's something I think about often as I walk my kids past all the idling vehicles in the school kiss-and-ride. The very narrow sidewalk runs parallel with the car entrance with no buffer and a property fence on the other side. So we are forced to breathe in all the exhaust fumes and tire particles. Imagine us being okay with an equivalent line of people smoking cigarettes in front of a school every day. We simply wouldn't. And that's the key point because despite immense lobbying and money, society can and does change.

A study from Happy Cities found that the lifestyle benefits that come from well-designed density show a strong correlation with happiness.

"Living in walkable neighborhoods, spending less time driving and commuting, and having access to third places like coffee shops and parks are associated with better well-being and social connectedness."

We know that density is necessary to stop sprawl; but if we want people to embrace it, we need to ensure that these benefits come with it. This will likely involve some changes to our zoning and parking requirements. But let's plan for a better future, not continue doing it in a way that perpetuates the problems associated with car dependency.

Also noted is that people are willing to pay more to live in areas like this. I'm not saying that's a good thing, walkability shouldn't be a luxury. But it does show us that people want to live in dense, walkable neighbourhoods.

How much do you trust your neighbours? How about the wider community in which you live? I've come across a few things over the last little while on the decline of social trust and the importance of it, especially when it comes to surviving disasters. This seems to be one of the consequences of our increasingly online world, the loss of the day-today encounters with the people we live closest to. Many of the daily interactions we once had with neighbours and other community members are being replaced with online checkouts, AI support chats, and faceless deliveries.

The thing is, this loss of trust also erodes empathy. Humans are naturally tribal, it's how we've survived. Yet, we've shifted so much of that into online communities with people we don't actually know and do not share geographic proximity with. This leaves us more likely to extend empathy to @username10128 than the family living across the street.

What I want to note here is that as our world continues to move into crisis after crisis we need to reclaim the art of working together for a shared public good. Cooperation might be the most needed skill of the 21st century. And it begins at a neighbourhood level.

As Bill McKiben writes,

"We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for [North] Americans will be hard."