Theology That Bites Back
“Our modern political tangles are a veritable festival of envy, everywhere you look. Trying to find envy in our political disputes—and especially when it involves the Jews—is like trying to find some beads at the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade.”
American Milk and Honey, p. 9
“Envy sharpens its teeth every night.”
American Milk and Honey, p. 8
“Apart from Christ, the electric crackle of envy runs along all the wires. Everything is hooked up to this particular grid. The current flows from Gentile to Jew, Jew to Gentile, white to black, black to white, short to tall, fat to skinny, and so on—mimetic desire and carping envy are absolutely everywhere and in everything. People who dismiss this with a wave of the hand do not understand the Scriptures, and they are blind when it comes to identifying one of the mainsprings of all unregenerate human action. The prohibition of envy and covetousness (‘of anything that is your neighbor’s’) is in the Ten Commandments for a reason” ().
American Milk and Honey, p. 5
“I refer, naturally enough, to the posturing of things like ‘social justice.’ That is just a high-flying name that people give to their malevolent envy, and it is like trying to polish a turd.”
American Milk and Honey, p. 4
“Because I am going to be walking through a minefield here, I thought perhaps the best way to begin might be by strapping on a pair of snowshoes and just tromping my way across.”
American Milk and Honey, p. 2
“The antisemitism I am going to be talking about is not the central problem. It is the canary that conked out in the mine. It is the first couple of coughs in a six-month losing battle with lung cancer. It is one of the fruits of a rancid tree, the tree of envy.”
American Milk and Honey, p. 2
“It is not antisemitism to believe that Jews are sinful. This is simply orthodox Christianity. All of us are sinful. But antisemitism does believe that Jews are uniquely sinful, and particularly destructive. As a stand-alone dogma, this is nonsense.”
American Milk and Honey, p. xvi
“Antisemitism is the notion that Jews are uniquely malevolent and destructive in their cultural, economic, and political influence in the world.”
American Milk and Honey, p. xv
“We must indeed learn how to fight for nature, not by means of nature. Natural affections by themselves do not empower us to engage on behalf of nature. But anyone who cannot identify the crackle of envy in antisemitism, or the smell of sulfur that wafts off of it, is not qualified for pastoral ministry” (American Milk and Honey, p. xv).
“Some might say, in defense of their idolatrous commitment to an absolutist view of tribal identity, that Scripture tells us to stick to the bounds of our appointed habitation (Acts 17:26)—as though this exercise of God’s sovereignty applied only to remote northern villages in Finland, or to White Town, Oklahoma. But God’s sovereignty in this applies equally to Brooklyn, that hot pot of jumbled ethnicities.”
American Milk and Honey, p. xv
