Ruth for the Bravest‪!‬

Ruth, a story of love and friendship from three thousand years ago that forces today's Bible reader to look harder and listen more attentively than ever. Why? Because half the world can relate to it more easily than to contemporary Christianity's values and perspectives on the meaning of love and friendship. Global South Christianity is becoming more missionary and Ruth speaks their language. Do they care about authorship arguments when they believe in a God who is in conversation with them every day? Will they care about the truthfulness of what some progressive Western Christians think are myths when they have just experienced a salvation that begs for a label points clearly to the supernatural? These are the coming faces of the Global South's brand of Christianity, of which Africa is not an insignificant part. This book intends to encourage the reader into the necessary conversations that will help the goals of the Good News to those who have lost it and to those who have never heard it. The Bible is the "good news" to some and the "good book" to others and something else to yet others choosing to engage it negatively.

The book of Ruth represents family concerns shared by the Global South and many people groups for whom the social safety nets of Europe and the Americas do not exist. Survival of the family has become an urgent Russian and Chinese concern for a different reason than for Africa and other Third World nations. The point of the levirate law, a law at the center of this book, was to provide an answer to a long standing problem that has not gone away. The Gospel preached by Evangelicalism is supposed to provide better answers than the Old Testament levirate law. If God's plan is to make the Jew jealous of the non-Jew, as the Bible claims, is the brand of values and social safety measures in Christianity the kind that will attract such followers of other religions to Christianity? This reading of Ruth is a primer towards a deeper study of the book itself. It is also a reading of Ruth with an eye towards community development and Global South concerns for the most vulnerable. Americans and Europeans are crying for fences to keep out the hordes from the South on their borders. Ruth has something to say about family survival and dislocation (may YHWH visit their countries of origin with food sufficiency and peace!). What God thought would help Israel become a leading nation includes the Levirate law.

I hope the reader will get much further than I have gone in this book because dealing with a world some consider to be a "jungle" threatening their "garden" requires compassion and wisdom in improving upon that which God gave to Israel. Love and wisdom is everywhere on the pages of Ruth and those who engage with the poor and needy of this world need to bring to their engagements more rather than less of these character strengths.