Salt and Light
Living the Sermon on the Mount
184 Pages
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Salt and Light puts hands and feet to the demands of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount from the viewpoint of a writer who believes they are not only viable, but inescapable - something for us to live out today.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus puts aside his usual parables and speaks plainly in language anyone can understand. Yet for centuries countless scholars have dissected and analyzed these important words - and dismissed their demanding precepts as unrealistic or symbolic.
Now back in print:
February 2013
Like Francis of Assisi and others, Arnold chose to live Jesus' words. He found new life by embracing the self-sacrificing and nonviolent demands of the Sermon on the Mount. This collection of talks and essays vividly describes a healing, energizing power for those burdened by the concerns of daily life. Arnold calls us to live for the Sermon's ultimate goal: the overturning of the prevailing order of injustice and building in its place a just, peaceable society motivated by love.
Arnold grappled with the Sermon on the Mount his whole adult life. His relentless faithfulness to its demands bore practical fruit in a community movement that is still thriving today. Although Arnold was addressing a Germany in political and social ferment, his words are not bound to time and place. They direct us out of our bankruptcy to a new, revolutionary way.
Arnold shows us that following these commandments consistently is neither an ideal nor an ordeal, but a matter of course in the community of Jesus. In the community of Jesus, life becomes clear, simple, decisive, and unequivocal. Gone are the many doubts and compromises, the many half-truths and the half-heartedness.
Salt and Light has all the simple, luminous, direct vision into things that I have come to associate with Eberhard Arnold. It moves me deeply. It is the kind of book that stirs to repentance and to renewal. I am very grateful for it. -Thomas Merton
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