At the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) 27th General Council, Prof. Nivedita Menon, a political thought scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, offered a compelling reimagining of justice—not as an abstract ideal, but as a daily act of resistance and renewal.
“Justice requires us to question what has been normalized over time,” Menon said during her keynote address. “Justice requires us to step outside of codes.”
Justice and Order
To illustrate how true justice often disrupts established norms, Menon referenced the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language. The language, she explained, evolved when students broke traditional linguistic rules to create new words and ways of thinking.
“What I learned from this amazing story about the birth and growth of a relatively new language is that rule breaking—that is, ‘disorder’—can be the foundation of new knowledge,” she said.
Justice and Equality
Menon challenged conventional notions of equality, arguing that justice must recognize difference rather than erase it.
“The idea of justice as impartial sounds very fair but is not fair at all,” she said. “Justice has to be based on the idea of recognizing differences and recognizing need.”
Using the example of blindness, she questioned why certain physical conditions are labeled as disabilities. “Why is blindness a disability? Because the world is built for sighted people,” she said. “Physical differences are disabilities only because society assumes a certain norm and builds around that norm.”
Justice and Freedom
Menon also examined how freedom is intertwined with justice, particularly from a feminist perspective.
“For feminism that goes beyond a narrow liberal interpretation, freedom cannot be only about individuals but is inevitably linked to community,” she said. “Single, individual women cannot be free; patriarchy has to end for any one woman to be truly free.”
She went on to argue that capitalism itself is incompatible with justice. “Capitalism is unjust,” Menon said. “Violence is involved in establishing it, in enclosing commons, dispossessing people of their habitats. And it involves violence toward the environment.”
Menon urged the audience to consider “degrowth,” a concept centered on reducing production and consumption to promote well-being and ecological balance.
“Economic activity must not exceed the carrying capacity of the planet and it should promote human well-being, not the avaricious pursuit of wealth,” she said.
Justice, she concluded, is not a single revolutionary act, but rather “a daily nibbling away at social norms” that collectively transforms society.
“In the future, I imagine a vibrant democracy—internally contested, locally rooted, recognizing heterogeneity, taking collective responsibility for ecological restoration and transformation,” she said. “A democracy that is anti-capitalist, degrowth-oriented, and always open to the emergence of new identities, new needs, new notions of justice.”
Embracing Disorder
Respondents to Menon’s address—Hanna Reichel, Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the Rt. Rev. Dr. Collin Cowan, moderator of the United Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands—offered their reflections.
Reichel drew from her experiences teaching theology, emphasizing that true justice requires diverse ways of thinking. “We need a differential theology to do justice to our different experience of the world,” she said. “Neither God nor justice can be formulated without indexing them to our differential experience.”
Cowan praised Menon’s framework for redefining justice as a dynamic and challenging pursuit.
“To follow Christ is to embrace disorder when order sustains oppression,” he said. “The path to justice is paved not by better managers of the old orders. If the church, if WCRC, dares to walk this path, we may yet glimpse the Kingdom—not as distant perfection, but as ever-emerging.”
