Doing the Right Thing: Praxis for Social Justice as Spiritual Practice

Doing the Right Thing

Praxis for Social Justice as Spiritual Practice

[Originally written in 2011, revised in 2026]

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

I first encountered the phrase “praxis for social justice” in the spring of 2007, when I began teaching in the BA Program in Liberal Studies at Antioch University Santa Barbara. Professor Dick Morrow, the program’s chair, introduced me to an educational philosophy that joined learning with doing, ethical reflection with public responsibility. It gave a name to a relationship I had been seeking among the different parts of my life. Teaching, sociology, activism, and the search for spiritual meaning could belong to a common undertaking.

I had long been concerned with power, inequality, and domination. I had participated in labor, feminist, LGBTQ+, ecological, and anti-imperialist movements. My intellectual life returned repeatedly to a practical question: how do people sustain arrangements that injure one another, and how can they learn to organize their lives differently? Praxis invited me to carry that question beyond the classroom and to recognize the classroom itself as one of the places where an answer would have to be practiced.

Over time, my work with people experiencing homelessness and mental illness deepened the question. My own experience of living unhoused also made it impossible to regard suffering solely as an object of professional concern. The distance between understanding a problem and changing the conditions that sustain it can be immense. A person can be heard, assessed, and discussed while remaining outside. An organization can care sincerely while retaining procedures that make care difficult to obtain. Doing the right thing requires attention to that distance.

My religious life brought another vocabulary to these concerns: reverence, compassion, sacred obligation, hope. Raised in a Christian home, I became skeptical of supernatural claims early in life. That skepticism has remained. Yet participation in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, reflection on nature, and the experience of working with others for justice have led me toward a spirituality grounded in this world. I find no contradiction in asking difficult questions about religious claims while taking seriously the experiences through which people discover meaning, belonging, and responsibility.

The spirituality I am trying to articulate begins with our dependence on one another and on the living world. We arrive without having made the conditions of our arrival. We depend on bodies, relationships, histories, and ecological processes we cannot command. We possess capacities for love and imagination alongside capacities for indifference and harm. To live attentively within those conditions is already to encounter questions larger than individual preference: what deserves protection, what do we owe one another, and how should we use the powers we possess?

I call the effort to join those questions with action praxis spirituality. It is an ongoing practice of examining what we do, acting with others to reduce suffering and change unjust arrangements, and learning from what follows. Paulo Freire’s account of praxis joins reflection and action within a dialogical undertaking of liberation (Freire 1970). Reflection helps direct action; action tests reflection. Other people’s responses can reveal what our intentions failed to recognize. An undertaking becomes spiritually significant for me when it changes the quality of my attention and deepens my responsibility for the relationships through which life is sustained.

This does not mean that every admirable action is religious, or that people need a spiritual vocabulary to work for justice. Secular ethical commitments can sustain profound generosity and courage. I am describing a way of inhabiting the work, not claiming ownership of its moral worth. Nor does calling an action sacred establish that it is helpful. The person receiving assistance must remain able to refuse, question, or correct it. My experience of meaning cannot overrule another person’s account of what I have done.

The central challenge, then, is to cultivate a spirituality capable of sustaining justice work without insulating it from criticism. Reverence must make us more attentive. Compassion must survive contact with disagreement. Hope must become practical enough to organize a next step. We need ways of acting that support life, ways of thinking that remain open to correction, and communities that help us return to the work after the first surge of conviction has passed.

The Sacred in a World We Share

For me, the sacred begins in an encounter with the worth of a life that exceeds its usefulness to anyone else. A person is more than a service need, a political example, or an opportunity for someone else to feel generous. The living world is more than a storehouse of resources. Reverence asks us to attend to these realities with care, even when doing so interrupts the habits through which we usually move.

Awe, gratitude, grief, compassion, and joy can each open this attentiveness. They do not all feel alike. Sometimes the experience is quiet: an awareness of dependence while walking outdoors, or a moment of stillness before responding to someone in distress. Sometimes it is embodied and communal: singing, dancing, shared laughter, a vigil, or the intensity of being among people whose presence makes a different future feel possible. My religious naturalism has room for both contemplation and collective vitality. The body participates in spiritual life; it is not merely the vehicle carrying a set of convictions.

Such experiences do not deliver infallible moral knowledge. A powerful feeling of unity can conceal disagreement. A congregation’s warmth can coexist with exclusion. The certainty that a cause is righteous can encourage people to disregard the methods by which they pursue it. Spiritual intensity needs companions: consent, careful listening, shared authority, and the willingness to examine consequences. The experience becomes more trustworthy when it can withstand those disciplines.

This is why community matters to my spirituality. I value places where people can grieve, celebrate, deliberate, and undertake obligations together. I also want those places to remain open to challenge. A religious community serves life when it supports inquiry, protects participation, and accepts responsibility for harm. Reverence loses its practical meaning when the institution claiming to embody it cannot hear the people it has injured.

Religion’s capacity to comfort and its capacity to protest deserve to be considered together. Marx’s familiar discussion of religion acknowledges both the expression of suffering and protest against it (Marx 1844). That tension remains useful. Comfort can help people survive long enough to act, but it can also encourage accommodation to avoidable suffering. The question is what a spiritual practice enables in the lives of those who undertake it, and whether it supports efforts to change the conditions producing distress.

I therefore want a spirituality that consoles without teaching resignation, strengthens conviction without making it immune to evidence, and invites belonging without demanding obedience. Its sacredness lies partly in what it asks me to protect. Its credibility lies partly in how it permits others to hold me accountable.

Justice as a Relationship and an Arrangement

Social justice concerns the conditions under which people can live with dignity, obtain the means of a viable life, participate in decisions affecting them, and challenge the exercise of power. Housing, food, healthcare, safety, and education belong inside that concern. So do the ordinary rights to speak, disagree, occupy public space, and receive an intelligible explanation when an institution makes a consequential decision.

Respect and redistribution need each other. Courtesy cannot substitute for housing; housing provision does not excuse degrading treatment. An institution can make resources available through procedures that humiliate applicants or place avoidable obstacles in their way. It can also become more welcoming while leaving the distribution of resources unchanged. Justice requires attention to both the material arrangement and the practical relationship through which people encounter it.

Critical Interactionism helps me investigate that relationship. Who may ask questions, and who must answer? Whose description enters the record? Who is expected to wait? Can someone challenge a classification or correct an error without losing access to help? These details connect the encounter to organizational rules and decisions elsewhere. They show how power becomes available for use in everyday life.

They also require careful interpretation. An unequal role does not automatically establish domination. A worker may need to ask questions to arrange appropriate assistance; a facilitator may need to allocate turns so that a meeting can proceed. The issue is how those powers are bounded, whether their use can be challenged, and what burdens or injuries they produce. Criticism becomes more effective when it identifies the practice responsible for a problem and the changes capable of addressing it.

With every action, we participate in making the world. Yet we possess unequal authority over what that world becomes. An applicant, a frontline worker, an administrator, and a funder may all contribute to an institutional sequence while having very different powers to alter it. This is why a spirituality of justice must move beyond the instruction to make better personal choices. It must help us understand how decisions are coordinated and organize the relationships through which those decisions can change.

We can begin locally without assuming that local action is sufficient. A respectful conversation can establish trust. A revised form can remove a barrier. A group can win a procedural change. Durable improvement may then require staff time, funding, housing, legal protection, or a different distribution of authority. The work is to connect these possibilities. A fairer interview cannot create a housing unit that does not exist, but a housing shortage does not justify every burden imposed on the person seeking one.

The Moment When a Habit Becomes a Question

Praxis often begins when something interrupts the familiar. A joke suddenly sounds cruel. A participant’s contribution is repeatedly passed over. A requirement that once seemed reasonable becomes impossible for someone to meet. A person receiving help tells us that our help has created a new problem. The interruption makes visible an arrangement we had been moving through without deliberate ethical examination.

I have described a sequence in which habitual action is interrupted, an alternative is considered, other people’s responses are anticipated, a different action is attempted, and consequences follow. This remains a useful way of thinking about ethical intervention, provided it is treated as a pattern to examine rather than a law of human conduct. Sometimes we act before we can explain why. Sometimes another person’s objection creates the pause. Sometimes an organized group has already prepared an alternative that makes intervention possible. Deliberate ethical reflection should also be distinguished from Garfinkel’s (1967) reflexivity of accountable practices: ordinary conduct helps constitute its setting whether or not a participant has paused to examine its ethics.

Consider an illustrative community meeting. Someone with lived experience identifies a difficulty in obtaining services. The conversation moves on, and a professional later raises a similar concern in terms the group readily accepts. A participant notices the earlier contribution has disappeared. They can ask that it be acknowledged, invite its author to elaborate, and request that the concern enter the decision record. The intervention might change the discussion. It might meet resistance. What follows determines how far the initial recognition travels.

The ethical action is unfinished at the moment it is performed. Other people interpret it, accept it, modify it, or refuse it. A person whose contribution we tried to protect may prefer a different intervention. The chair may agree without assigning responsibility for follow-up. An apparently successful exchange may leave the institution’s procedure untouched. Praxis includes returning to these consequences and asking what the action actually made possible.

This is the sacred pause as I understand it: an opening in which habitual conduct becomes a question and another response becomes available. Its value does not depend on quietness or solitary introspection. A colleague’s challenge, a group’s refusal, or a community’s grief can create it. The pause becomes spiritually significant when it allows us to recognize an obligation we had overlooked and makes us willing to act on that recognition.

There is courage in such moments, but courage is unevenly costly. A secure participant may challenge an authority with little risk; someone dependent on that authority may face serious consequences. Spiritual exhortations to speak up can become careless when they ignore that difference. Those with protection have a responsibility to help make dissent safer through shared action, workable procedures, and material support. We should not require the most vulnerable person in the room to prove everyone else’s commitment to justice.

Unlearning Oppression and Accepting Correction

My teaching on unlearning oppression has been concerned with the habits through which unequal relationships become familiar. These include assumptions about competence, expectations of deference, patterns of interruption, and the ease with which someone else’s discomfort can be dismissed. Erica Sherover-Marcuse’s work provides an important resource for examining how consciousness and the practices sustaining oppression can be changed. Her approach to unlearning directs attention toward work that has to be undertaken repeatedly, rather than an enlightened identity one acquires once and for all.

For me, this requires an uncomfortable willingness to examine conduct that seems innocent from where I stand. I can favor equality while claiming more space than others. I can value participation while setting a timetable that excludes people with fewer resources. I can oppose paternalism while deciding in advance what another person needs. Awareness helps, but the strongest evidence often arrives through a response I did not expect or particularly want to hear.

Accepting correction can be a spiritual practice. It asks me to loosen my attachment to the image of myself as a good person and attend to the relationship requiring repair. That does not mean accepting every accusation uncritically. It means investigating the concern, preserving room for disagreement, and resisting the temptation to make my intentions the final measure of the event. An apology gains significance through what I change and what I remain willing to examine.

There is a similar discipline in relinquishing control. Working with people for justice means their priorities can revise the undertaking. They may decline the role we imagined for them, question our strategy, or insist on a need we thought secondary. If their participation cannot alter the project, our language of empowerment has outrun our practice. Solidarity requires room for people to become inconvenient to the plans made on their behalf.

The spiritual significance of this work lies in the quality of relationship it cultivates. Humility becomes practical when an objection receives a hearing. Compassion becomes more credible when assistance can be refused. Equality becomes more tangible when people can influence the terms of their participation. These achievements are modest enough to investigate and important enough to matter.

Reflection, Immediate Care, and Collective Change

A person who is hungry needs food. Someone exposed to cold needs warmth. We should be wary of criticizing immediate assistance because it has not yet transformed the economic order. People need to survive while change is organized. Service can preserve life, establish relationships, and reveal failures in the arrangements that are supposed to support people.

Yet service can also become a routine that leaves recipients dependent on the giver’s discretion. The distinction concerns how it is organized: whether people have choices, whether they are treated respectfully, whether refusal carries a penalty, and whether their experience can influence what happens next. A generous undertaking becomes more just when those receiving assistance have some authority over its form.

I now find it more useful to distinguish work that meets immediate needs, work that builds collective capacity, and work that changes institutional arrangements. These purposes can support one another. A service encounter may identify a recurring barrier. People affected by that barrier may organize, formulate a proposal, and seek a change in policy. Education, advocacy, public testimony, and organizing can connect the immediate problem to the decisions sustaining it.

Praxis requires following those connections rather than choosing a morally superior category of work. It asks what is needed now, who should help define the response, what capacity is being built, and which arrangement needs changing. It also asks what resources are necessary. Volunteer conviction cannot indefinitely compensate for inadequate staffing, and a compassionate referral cannot guarantee an available place.

Collective action gives personal commitment reach. It allows people to divide tasks, compare interpretations, preserve knowledge, and maintain pressure over time. It also introduces new responsibilities: participants must negotiate disagreement, explain decisions, share credit, and examine whose work is becoming invisible. A movement’s pursuit of justice does not exempt its own relationships from scrutiny.

Community as a Place to Return

The work can be exhausting. There are losses that cannot be repaired, meetings that produce little, promises that dissolve, and people whose needs remain unanswered despite sustained effort. A spirituality that speaks only of transformation can leave participants unprepared for these experiences. It can make fatigue feel like a moral failure and uncertainty feel like betrayal.

Community offers a place to return with both conviction and doubt. Congregations, recovery groups, classrooms, vigils, organizing groups, and circles of friendship can provide what I think of as social containers: recurring settings where experience can be shared, grief held, commitments examined, and participation renewed. Their usefulness depends on how they are organized. Belonging should leave room for disagreement, silence, withdrawal, and return.

Rest belongs within this account. Bodies have limits; care requires continuity; people need relationships that are not entirely organized around crisis. Learning to share responsibility can protect both the work and those undertaking it. We cannot build a humane world by treating ourselves or our fellow workers as endlessly available instruments.

Communal joy matters too. Music, movement, humor, food, and celebration can give people a felt experience of the relationships they hope to extend. Those experiences are part of what makes participation sustainable. They must remain hospitable to different bodies, temperaments, and histories. Collective intensity has spiritual value when people can join freely and retain authority over how they participate.

A just community is therefore a continuing accomplishment. Its practices need attention: who welcomes newcomers, who explains procedures, who cleans up, who is compensated, who gets heard, and who can rest. The ordinary organization of these tasks can sustain a vision that would otherwise remain a declaration. Here too, the world we hope for has to become available in what we do together.

Prayer, Contemplation, and the Discipline of Attention

Prayer remains important to my spirituality even without belief in a supernatural power intervening on request. It gives form to gratitude, grief, longing, and commitment. In prayer I can acknowledge the suffering I would prefer to avoid, the help I have received, and the changes my own conduct requires. I can give attention to what matters before the demands of the day scatter it.

I do not need to claim that the universe has heard a petition in order to recognize that the act of praying can change my relationship to a situation. Its meaning is available in the attention it organizes and the commitments it renews. A prayer for compassion places a question before me: how will compassion enter the next encounter? A prayer for justice asks what I am prepared to undertake with others.

Contemplation creates similar opportunities. Stillness, mindful walking, attention to breath, time outdoors, and reflective writing can interrupt the momentum of a habitual response. They may help us distinguish urgency from impulse or conviction from defensiveness. They do not grant an unobstructed view of reality. Our interpretations still require conversation, evidence, and the experience of those whose circumstances we are trying to understand.

The connection to action can be simple and demanding. After reflecting, I may need to make a call, listen without taking over, revisit a decision, support someone else’s proposal, or accept that I misunderstood. Sometimes the appropriate action is to wait with someone rather than rush to solve the situation. Sometimes it is to organize a challenge to an arrangement that waiting will never improve. Discernment concerns the difference.

The familiar separation of inner transformation and public action becomes less useful here. Attention is cultivated through practices undertaken in a shared world. Relationships expose the limits of our understanding. Action gives reflection something concrete to examine. Spiritual life acquires depth through this continuing exchange, especially when it helps us remain responsive after our first interpretation has failed.

Bearing Witness and Finding a Prophetic Voice

To bear witness is to remain answerable to what we have encountered. It involves resisting the convenient disappearance of suffering from public attention. In homelessness work, that can mean remembering the person beyond the case, naming a death beyond the statistic, and asking what conditions made a life harder to sustain. Witnessing does not require certainty about every cause. It requires care with what can be said and a willingness to investigate what remains unanswered.

Vigils can give this responsibility a public form. The Longest Night vigil brings mourning into a shared space and gives the community an occasion to remember people whose lives can otherwise disappear from its account of itself. Such remembrance is spiritually significant to me because it resists the reduction of a person to a problem that has ceased to require attention. Death does not exhaust what can be owed to a life.

Public witness also carries obligations to those remembered and those still living. A story should not be taken merely because it is powerful. People have claims to privacy, control over disclosure, and participation in how their experience is represented. Advocacy can reproduce exclusion when the witness becomes the authoritative speaker and the person whose life supplied the account disappears again.

I understand a prophetic voice as the willingness to bring moral commitments into public confrontation with their consequences. Amos’s demand that justice “roll down like waters” still speaks to that task (Amos 5:24). I can receive its challenge without claiming divine authorization for my own judgments. The prophetic tradition asks whether religious observance and public declarations are accompanied by arrangements that protect those most exposed to harm.

Prophetic speech should remain specific enough to be examined. Which rule creates the barrier? Whose decision can change it? What resources are absent? What do affected people propose? Outrage can initiate attention, but careful explanation and collective organization give that attention direction. The spiritual commitment gains public credibility when it can name both the injury and a practicable responsibility for addressing it.

Hope That Can Be Practiced

I still believe another world is possible. I no longer want that conviction to depend on an assurance that history is steadily improving or that a change of consciousness will inevitably become a change of institutions. Gains can be reversed. Knowledge can be ignored. People can act courageously and still lose. Hope must be able to live with these facts if it is to remain useful.

The hope I seek is sustained through practices that make a different response available: a relationship in which correction is welcome, a group capable of acting together, a procedure that can be challenged, a resource placed where it is needed. Each creates some room for a future that is not simply the repetition of an injury. Their limits remain real. So does their significance.

Doing the right thing is an ongoing question. What does this person need, and what do they say they need? What can I undertake, and what requires collective power? Who has been left out of the decision? What happened after we acted? What must we change? These questions prevent moral commitment from hardening into a flattering account of ourselves.

Praxis spirituality joins reverence for life with the work of protecting it. It gives room to awe and grief, contemplation and celebration, immediate care and organized change. It asks us to make our commitments recognizable in our relationships and to let those relationships revise our understanding of the commitments. That is how spiritual experience can become a sustained public responsibility.

I cannot remake the world alone, and I cannot stand outside the histories in which I participate. I can learn to notice more carefully, share authority, undertake obligations with others, and return when the work becomes difficult. The possibility of a better world acquires substance through those relationships and through the material arrangements we build to support them. For me, their cultivation is sacred work.

Do the right thing. Then remain present long enough to discover what your action did, listen to those it affected, and take responsibility for what comes next.

Selected Sources

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder and Herder.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Marx, Karl. 1844. Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

Sherover-Marcuse, Erica. 1986. Emancipation and Consciousness: Dogmatic and Dialectical Perspectives in the Early Marx. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Smith, Dorothy E. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(2): 125–151.