Biography
John Willis is a second-year Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School, and he is interested in crafting a postcolonial vision for community, ecology, and spirituality that addresses the injustices of the climate crisis. John believes that the bedrock of unflinching climate justice activism is the spiritual discipline of hope, and thus his work begins by grounding in the texts, practices, and prophetic imaginations of religious community. John wants to apply that hope in the context of the nonprofit sector, mobilizing political, technological, spiritual, and relational resources to support disinherited people in enduring the various impacts of climate change.
Paper Abstract
The book of Leviticus, perhaps more than any other book of the Bible, has a reputation for being indecipherably archaic to the average reader. To modern ears, all the talk about sacrifice, priesthood, ritual impurity, and capital punishment seems nearly impossible to square with contemporary ethics and culture. Accordingly, disenchantment with the text of Leviticus is not the subject of the newest, sexiest, best-selling scholarly bombshell, but rather the default setting for most devotional readers. However, there is more to be gleaned from the book of Leviticus than just a perplexing reminder that we live in a very different time than that of the ancient Israelites. Instead, the book speaks directly and profoundly to a world of environmental degradation, climate crisis, and hyper-individualist, extractive capitalism, offering us a better, more humble way of belonging with God and creation.
In this essay, I will explore how the central themes of holiness and covenantal community, brought together with animist ethics in Leviticus 20:22-26, place embodied, relational ethics at the center of Israelite life and worship. My central claim about Leviticus 20:22-26 is this: with the common thread of communal holiness characteristic of the Holiness (H) source in Leviticus, the passage weaves together laws concerning ritual purity, diet, social justice, sexual ethics, Molech worship, agriculture, and sabbath that may seem otherwise unrelated. The connective tissue of these disparate laws is the animism assumed by the writers of Leviticus. Because the animist sensibilities of the text are often automatically dismissed by modern commentators, the extent to which H expands P's understanding of holiness to include the whole community of Israel is often lost. However, when the animist ethics involved are recovered, the text blossoms into a profound, radical theology of creation and relation that we desperately need today.