OUR PHILOSOPHY

Justice, love, and nonviolence are triple threads that we must interweave to achieve a beloved community. By beloved community, we mean the whole people of God - regardless of social, religious, and economic differences - living in new and right relations with God, each other, and all aspects of creation.

At the heart of the work we do at SpiritHouse is the deeply held view that we cannot be free until we are all free. We are convinced that as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment or destiny."

Therefore, SpiritHouse operates from the deeply held belief that racial injustice and violence are social and spiritual diseases that contaminate and dehumanize all of us. This applies to communities in power as well as communities that are socially and economically dispossessed. Injustice and violence spreads a national cancer that eats away at our national unity and potential. As a national nonprofit, we work for a healthy and vibrant nation that has plenty of good room for everyone to use their talents to build up a better society.

We have changed the world in the past, and we can do it now. We did it during the Abolition Movement, Labor Movement, Southern Freedom Movement, Lesbian and Gay Movement and the Feminist Movement. Our victorious work together reminds us that we are not entrapped by bad history. As a community, we have tremendous capacity to break through our social divides and work for the common good. Nor do we come to our work for justice empty-handed. We possess the power, resources and gifts to break through the chains of violence and injustice and open up the world for ourselves and others.

The SpiritHouse Project's work is a call for a new peace and justice movement that invites us to be a part of a spiritual journey in which we work with each other to break with the status quo. It is a spiritual call to reconcile our relations with God, each other, and all aspects of creation by building and sustaining what Pablo Friere calls intimate democratic spaces that cut across the social, economic and religious divides in our lives.

For the SpiritHouse Project, justice and love are interconnected. Love cannot exist with the absence of justice; nor are love and justice abstract concepts. Rather, they must show up in how we live our daily lives in relation to others. A concept of love without justice gives the oppressors easy grace by requiring those whom they oppress to love them unconditionally. It says that they are lovable without changing their behavior. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than one would have for a pet. Love at its best is justice concretized."

Injustice breeds and spreads lies that distort our images of God, ourselves, and others. SpiritHouse believes that the truth sets us free. Therefore truth-telling plays a major role in our work. SpiritHouse Project helps unveil the truth through research, the arts, spiritual reflections, stories of ordinary people, action, education and community building, sacred texts, broadsides, and community formation.