Shalom Ethics: Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself

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.