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Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice is unavailable, but you can change that!

Two parables that have become firmly lodged in popular consciousness and affection are the parable of the Good Samaritan and the parable of the Prodigal Son. These simple but subversive tales have historically had a significant impact on shaping the spiritual, aesthetic, moral, and legal traditions of Western civilization, and their capacity to inform debate on a wide range of moral and social...

Significantly, “compassion” in Luke’s Gospel is used only of God (1:78, cf. 1:50, 54) and of Jesus (7:13), and of the two most extraordinary parabolic characters of all: the father of the Prodigal Son (15:20) and the Good Samaritan (10:33).21 Both these parables are used to dramatize a divine reality invading the conventional world of first-century society, a reality activated by and embodied most fully in the larger gospel story by the person of Jesus himself. In this sense, as McDonald observes,
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