About this item
God once declared everything in the world "very good." Can you imagine it? A Vision of Hope for a Broken World Shalom is what God declared. Shalom is what the Kingdom of God looks like. Shalom is when all people have enough. It's when families are healed. It's when churches, schools, and public policies protect human dignity. Shalom is when the image of God is recognized in every single human. Shalom is our calling as followers of Jesus's gospel. It is the vision God set forth in the Garden and the restoration God desires for every relationship. What can we do to bring shalom to our nations, our communities, and our souls? Through a careful exploration of biblical text, particularly the first three chapters of Genesis, Lisa Sharon Harper shows us what "very good" can look like today, even after the Fall.
About the Author
Currently Sojourners Senior Director of Mobilizing, Ms. Harper previously served as the founding executive director of New York Faith & Justice. In that capacity she helped establish Faith Leaders for Environmental Justice, a city-wide collaborative effort of faith leaders committed to leveraging the power of their constituencies and their moral authority in partnership with communities bearing the weight of environmental injustice. She also organized faith leaders to speak out for immigration reform and organized the South Bronx Conversations for Change, a dialogue-to-change project between police and the community. Her writing has been featured in The National Civic Review, God's Politics blog, The Huffington Post, Relevant Magazine, Patheos.com, Urban Faith, and Prism where she has written extensively on tax reform, comprehensive immigration reform, health care reform, poverty, racial and gender justice, and transformational civic engagement. Ms. Harper's faith-rooted approach to advocacy and organizing has activated people of faith across the U.S. and around the world to address structural and political injustice as an outward demonstration of their personal faith. Having earned her masters degree in Human Rights from Columbia University in New York City, Ms. Harper's 2011 book, Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics, was co-written with D.C. Innes (an evangelical Republican who is also a Tea-Partier) . Harper and Innes explore their philosophies of government and business as well as six major issues the next generations of evangelicals must wrestle with to be faithful witnesses in the public square. (October 2011, Russell Media) Ms. Harper's first book, Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican ... or Democrat (October 2008, The New Press) offers a power-packed look at the roots of evangelical faith, how Evangelicals strayed so far from those roots, and what is bringing them back. Ms. Harper co-founded and co-directed the Envision 2008: The Gospel, Politics, and the Future conference on the campus of Princeton University (June 2008) and co-chaired the Envision 2011: Caring for the Community of Creation: Environmental Justice, Climate Change, and Prophetic Witness symposium in New York City (June 2011) . She was the recipient of Sojourners' inaugural Organizers Award and the Harlem "Sisters of Wisdom" Award. She was celebrated on Rick Warren's website Purposedriven.com as one of the site's inaugural seven "Take Action Heroes," was named "#5 of the Top 13 Women to Watch in 2012" by the Center for American Progress, was awarded the 2013 Faith and Justice Leadership Award by the National Black Women's Roundtable, was recently awarded the National Council of La Raza Capital Award for Public Service for her participation as a core faster in the 2013 #Fast4Families initiative for immigration reform and was recently recognized as one of "50 Powerful Women Religious Leade
