The politics of community will also require a more profound understanding of the meaning of justice. Both liberal and conservative notions of justice are based on widely assumed and well-established Western doctrines of individualism. Justice is rooted in individual human rights for both the Right and the Left. But such an individualistic idea of justice is now failing is in the midst of a global crisis that cries out for a new and deeper sense of connection and community.

Here again, religious insights can help us. In the Hebrew Scriptures, one finds the more holistic concept of shalom as the best definition of justice. It is a deeper and wider notion than the securing of individual rights. The vision of shalom requires us to reestablish "right relationships." It is a call to justice in the whole community and for the entire habitat. Shalom is an inclusive notion of justice extending even to the rest of God's creatures and whole of the creation. Restoring right relationships takes us further than respecting individual rights. It pushes us to begin to see ourselves as part of a community, even as members of an extended but deeply interconnected global family, and ultimately as strands in the web of life that we all share and depend upon. The biblical vision of shalom could be the basis for a new politics of community and social healing that we so need.

Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics