faith.reason.baseball

this is from a sojourners article about an immigrant woman who is seeking refuge in her church. i was a little confused about the opinion of this writer - he sets up the reasons she should be deported and then counters with her biblical argument. mad props for mentioning isaiah:

Israel's scripture is relentless in its demand that God's people care for the
sojourner. This is not just an obscure law barked by a distant deity-it is a
command rooted in Israel's own experience as a mistreated foreigner in Egypt:
"You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you
were aliens in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 23:9).

and here's the really interesting part, i think:

Mainline liberal churches are not noted for their literalist view of
scripture. Generally it is "conservatives" or "evangelicals" who attend to the
letter of the Bible, and liberals who prefer its "spirit," to gain some wiggle
room out of uncomfortable moral positions like scripture passages on
homosexuality. But in this case the liberals are attending strenuously to the
letter, and conservatives are blithely and arrogantly ignoring it. Perhaps the
very categories "literalist" and "liberal" fail, and we should speak now of
different portions of scripture to which each seeks to be faithful. Some of us
would maintain that we could all be faithful to all of it-as long as we learn
also to forgive each other when we fail, as we will often.

yeah, i think the bible will continue to challenge us more than we think it
will. and i'd say [in a simplistic way, i know] that this is why we have the
church, if only to help us sort out the messiness that comes with this big of a
challenge...