Food For The Poor Gift Catalogue

Ten propositions on political theology, by Kim Fabricius

[Marc Chagall]













...

8. The flipside of an apolitical church is a sacralised state. This is “the Constantinian trap” (Lesslie Newbigin). And a sacralised state easily becomes a demonic state. The cross is draped with the flag, and discipleship is absorbed into citizenship. The German Christians are the paradigm nationalist idolaters; history repeats itself in the farce of the Religious Right. “Never was anything in this world loved too much,” wrote Thomas Traherne, “but many things have been loved in a false way, and all in too short a measure.” The true love of ecumenism trumps the sentimental love of patriotism.

9. The church’s political witness ends in the public square, but it begins around a table. At worship the church bows neither to Caesar, nor to Mammon or Mars, but to the crucified and risen One. At worship the Spirit begins to straighten our disordered desires, as we hear an alternative narrative to manifest destiny, and learn an alternative praxis to Realpolitik. Yet worship can be a bolthole rather than a sign of reconciliation and resistance. “Where the body is not properly discerned, Paul reminds the Corinthians, consumption of the Eucharist can make you sick or kill you (1 Cor. 11:30). This might explain the condition of some of our churches” (William T. Cavanaugh).

10. The Apocalypse of John is “a visionary theological and poetic representation of the spiritual environment within which the church perennially finds itself living and struggling” (Richard B. Hays). It is a samizdat text of protest to the pretensions of power, a warning against complacency, and a call to discernment in reading the signs of the times. The powerful inevitably twist it into a self-serving mandate for accumulation and aggression; only those who long for justice and peace see that the hermeneutical key is the slaughtered Lamb who gently roars. Here is the text for a political theology that begins to re-imagine and re-shape the world in anticipation of the parousia of Christ.

Post-9/11 Postscript
In Apocalypse Now: Reflections on Faith in a Time of Terror (2005), Duncan Forrester proposes an interesting juxtaposition: on the one hand, the statement of support for the Kaiser published by a group of ninety-three leading German intellectuals, including theologians, on the day the First World War broke out; on the other hand, the public “Letter from America: What We Are Fighting For” in support of President Bush’s “war on terror,” signed by sixty prominent American intellectuals, including theologians, five months after 9/11. Both letters are so theologically thin, however, that they amount to pom-pom propaganda for imperial states. The first letter awoke Karl Barth from his Schleiermacherian slumbers, the second letter aroused Stanley Hauerwas and Paul Griffiths to a polemical response. But by and large the people of Germany and the US sleepwalked into slaughter. Moral: When political theology is faithful, expect it to be critical and subversive; when it is unfaithful, expect it to be ideological and fatal.

Labels: ethics, Kim Fabricius, politics

posted by Ben Myers at 8:00 AM
35 Comments:

The Nation State Project, Schizophrenic Globalization, and the Eucharist: An Interview with William T. Cavanaugh

Disembedding and Theosis

HolyShit...





This is one of the sanest and most inspirational pieces of writing I have ever read. I think it might be the cue for me to stop all this web-surfing and reading 15 books at a time and try to start really putting my shoulder to the wheel.

Here's and excerpt:

...Nietzscheanism is an argument in the final analysis that seeks to overcome modern/postmodern disembedded alienation by a return to pagan embeddedness. Christianity, insofar as it is a higher religion that calls humans to a life of at least partial disembeddedness, has to justify itself in terms that make sense in the face of this natural contemporary attraction to neo-paganism. Rationalist or disembedded paganism is duking it out in the contemporary culture wars with religious fundamentalism, and neither for me offers a way forward. So I want to provide a preliminary outline about how how a deeper kind of Christianity has the resources to offer another possibility.

But before doing that, let me reiterate a point I've made in posts this summer. I'm not anti-pagan. I think that embedded pagan consciousness embraced dimensions of reality that are not currently available to buffered moderns. While there have been at least since the axial era individuals who have been precocious in their disembeddedness, modernity is the process by which cultures and peoples become disembedded. But while I think that modern disembeddedness is an advancement, I don't think it is the goal--"re-embeddedness" is. Disembeddedness is a necessary but temporary moment in cultural maturation, but once achieved, the goal is to retrieve what has been left behind.

That's my gloss on the gospel's injunction that we become as little children, and the process by which we do it is "second naivete", which is to use Blake's language, to re-open the doors of perception. We need to find ways to open up to what that older consciousness experienced, but with the maturity of critical consciousness and the dignity of an adult level of freedom. And so this opening up, if it is not to be regressive, if it's not to be some form of "going native", has to follow some rules. And those rules require the integration of a disembedded consciousness with an embedded one.

Now back to a Christian imagination of the way forward. I think that anybody who is serious about the spiritual life has to have some level of discipline about it. I think this discipline has many aspects to it, but one that is central is the development of a prayer or meditative practice. Such a discipline is an exercise in disembeddedness, but it's important to be clear what its goal is. I think there has been a tendency both in the Western and Eastern spirituality to see the goal as a kind of permanent disembeddedness. I don't.

People who see it this way imagine life on earth as exile in a Platonic cave ruled by the logic of original sin or maya or samsara. And whether east or west, they think of redemption as an escape from from the Cave into the true, the good, the real, which is a transcendent realm outside time and space. And so for them the purpose of prayer and meditation is to enter into that transcendent world, and that the goal is to stay there as long as possible.

That's not how I think about it. I think that being in touch with or vulnerable to the influence of that transcendent dimension is essential for our health and sanity, but I'm not an advocate of escaping life in the Cave, but of gently, gradually lighting it up with the unconsuming fire of heaven.

As I mentioned before there are many levels of disembeddeness, and even we moderns are disembedded in comparison with the embedded, unbuffered consciousness of premoderns, we remain embedded in our ordinary daily "cave" consciousness. So we benefit from the rhythmic daily exercise of trying to stand outside of it for a while. That's what a meditative practice seeks to do. Or as an alternative to the cave metaphor, I think it's useful to think of our ordinary consciousness as our being carried along mostly submerged in a slowly moving river, and the attempt at prayer or meditation is the effort to climb up onto the bank for awhile to let our souls dry out. Some days it's just not possible to pull ourselves out, but even on good days, when we are able to get ourselves entirely onto the river bank, it takes a while for all the water to drain away, and often we find ourselves still covered with ooze and seaweed and suckers.

Now the goal is to let the concerns and bric-a-brac of ordinary daily consciousness drain away and to dislodge the persistent thoughts and concerns that cling to us even as we sit there on the river bank. It's not easy, and I don't have to rehearse here all the problems the so-called monkey mind presents to us to complicate the effort. But the goal is to create an emptiness, or perhaps better to say a dryness, which is the precondition for being filled by or kindled by the aforementioned unconsuming flame and it's warming light that to be sure shines on the river, but is not of the river.

This emptiness and dryness are not pleasant, and it is very difficult to sustain--one longs to return to the familiar comfort of the river, and we need to do that. But in all the literature about the spiritual life that has any credibility, this discomfort is seen as a necessary, purgative first step. The dryness leads to the kindling of illumination, and the illuminations, if allowed to reshape one's soul, lead one on a path to union, which is the goal of "theosis". Meditative practice, insofar as it is the sustained effort to be radically open to grace, comprises all three stages--purgation, illumination, union. We are none of us, believer or unbeliever, ever cut off completely from the ubiquity of grace, but it is possible to become more radically open to its superabundant and transforming power.

And to the degree that a soul becomes interiorly transformed, when it goes back into the river of its ordinary cares and responsibilities, it does so in a way that has a kind of filtering or transforming effect on her immediate psychic environment. The river is beautiful, but it is polluted, and the question needs to be asked: By what means can it be cleaned up? I believe that nothing lasting or true happens except by the agency of this transforming power. I see it as a gradual, gentle process achieved by people over time who, with varying degrees of intensity carry this fire within them, and over the centuries their activity has a regenerative effect. Meditative practice is one way to increase the intensity.

People who have advanced in this respect radiate something positive and regenerative that other river dwellers pick up on. Certainly the Jesus of the gospels had this effect. One of the most interesting things about the gospel accounts was the way some people picked up on what Jesus radiated and how others didn't. Typically "sinners" were more responsive than the religious professionals, whom Jesus describes as whited sepulchers--all clean outside, but rotten inside. I have written before about Whited Sepulcher Syndrome (see here and here), but it strikes me as I think about this business of embeddedness and disembeddedness, that Whited Sepulcher Syndrome is a case of "arrested disembeddedness", a taking of the first step (purgation) without getting to the second, illumination. It's mechanical morality without grace. Emptiness without illumination. Dryness without fire.

And it suggests a way to better understand the difference between moral and moralistic. The moral person, whatever the condition of his exterior is alive in his interior. And the gospels are clear that inner aliveness is far more important than an exterior correctness, especially when exterior correctness leads to an inner death. And it is the insistence on exterior correctness by the moralistic, whether they be Torquemada or James Dobson, that is profoundly immoral because it is so profoundly deadly--pure repression with no goal other than to repress. A withered deadness with no goal other than to be dry and dead. Any lively paganism is more spiritually alive than that kind of moralistic Christianity. And that kind of paganism is also, when it encounters real Christianity, more receptive to it. Nothing could be clearer from a reading of the gospels. The "sinners" time and time again had an easier time recognizing who Jesus was; the religious professionals were the ones who seemed to be too blind or too dead to do so.

For the ascesis of the purgative stage can lead to the deadliest form of alienation if the necessary "dryness" isn't at some point kindled. (Father Ferapont in the Brothers Karamazov is the counter to Father Zossima in this respect.) And these moralistic Christians suffering from Whited Sepulcher Syndrome, because they are mostly interested in control and security, do everything they can to snuff out any spiritual flame that might kindle in themselves or in their congregations. For when there is a kindling, the flame will die if it is not given oxygen, and that oxygen is provided by "vertical breathing", one form of which is prayer/meditation.

I think there are lots of people who have been kindled but have had the flame snuffed out of them by the moralism of the churches they've sought out to help them find ways to sustain and grow it. But the whole logic of any kind of morality is not simply about correct behavior, but about creating the optimal conditions for the kindling and growth of this flame. And the goal of prayer and meditation is not to leave the world of ordinary consciousness to live forever on the river bank (or outside the cave), but to bring the flame and its transforming, purifying power back into ordinary conscious in such a way that it will not be drowned by it.

And that requires keeping one's head above the waters as the body is carried along by their currents. For the head needs to be vigilant as to what lies ahead, and exposed to the source of light which illuminates it and inspires the action in the world that leads eventually to its redemption. This vigilance, this refusal to be pulled under, this daily effort to pull oneself out for a short time are keys to understanding what it means to be chaste. Chasitity is the capability to live in a polluted environment and yet to radiate this interior fire. It's the capability to swim freely in the river without being dragged under or coopted by it. It's not about staying out of the river altogether.

The goal is union, but not just with the divine, but union with everything--with the earth, with people, with the entire cosmos, and this union can be effected only by the slow transformation of our souls from the soggy things they are now into a roaring unconsuming flame of love. That is our telos. That will be our theosis. That is our deepest identity--our "I am", that part of us that was created in the image and likeness. It is the likeness of the flame that Moses encountered on the mountain in the wilderness, after which the great Jewish disembedding began. And we Christians believe that the flame that Moses encountered on Sinai is the same flame the people of Jesus' day encountered when they met him, and which it is still possible to encounter now in different ways. And that unconsuming flame of love that burned in him was a flame that he kindled in all those around him, and so it has happened down through the centuries wherever true Christianity has survived and flourished...

Moderate Complacency

another good one from Jack at "AfterTheFuture"

A Christmas prayer for peace

By John Dear SJ
Created Dec 18 2007 - 09:26

Thank you, God of peace, for announcing the coming of peace on earth and for coming among us to make peace. Thank you for siding with the homeless, the refugee, the marginalized, the immigrant, the outsider, the disenfranchised, the imprisoned, the enemy. Thank you for being good news for the poor and the oppressed.

Thank you for your incarnation in the nonviolent Jesus, for showing us the Way, the Truth, the Life of Peace. Thank you for loving us so much, for bringing your universal, unconditional, nonviolent love into the world. Thank you for teaching us how to live, how to love, how to serve, how to pray, how to make peace, how to show compassion, how to practice nonviolence, how to resist empire, how to suffer, and how to die.

Thank you for calling us away from violence, injustice and empire into the new life of nonviolence, justice, community and resurrection.

Most of all, thank you for teaching us how to be human. Alas, so many of us want to play god that we've become inhuman. You, God of peace, on the other hand, let go of your divinity to share our humanity, and in the process, teach us how to be Godly.

Dear God, we celebrate the birth of the nonviolent Jesus, his life and love, his teachings and works, his steadfast resistance, and his suffering, death and resurrection. We celebrate the most nonviolent life in human history, the greatest peacemaker the world has ever seen. We celebrate how his life and love continue to disarm, heal, and transform us all.

This Christmas, give us the grace to imitate his life, to become new people of creative nonviolence like him. Help us to become practitioners of peace, contemplatives of peace, teachers of peace, apostles of peace, prophets of peace. Help us abolish systemic injustice, resist empire, end war, dismantle weapons, and study war no more, that we might reverence life and creation as he did.

Bless us that we might be your beloved sons and daughters, peacemakers, people who love one another, love our neighbors, and love our nation's enemies. Bless us that we might be a new Christmas people, who, like Mary and Joseph, welcome Christ into the world, see Christ in the poor, serve Christ in the world's children, raise Christ through our nonviolent actions, and bring Christ's Christmas gift of peace on earth to fruition in our lives and work.

Help us all to honor Jesus by obeying his commandments, following his footsteps and doing what he did, that we too might incarnate your holy spirit of peace and nonviolence.

This Christmas, God of peace, bless us all over again, that we might live with a new, mature faith, that we might become peacemaking saints, that we might be instruments of your Christmas gift of peace on earth.

Bless us all, that suffering may end, that all may be healed, that all may live in peace, that all may radiate your love, that all may be one.

In the name of the nonviolent Jesus. Amen.

Reading the Brothers Karamazov...

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~karamazo/audio.html

The gift of contemplative prayer

[Click on title for link to podcasts]

Fr. Thomas Keating
The gift of contemplative prayer

Benedictine Fr. Thomas Keating speaks on the ancient and modern origins of contemplative prayer, which he calls Centering Prayer, and its place in our lives. He sees contemplative prayer as a gift from God, allowing us to open to the Spirit in a deeper and much needed way.

Episode 1: Rediscovering the tradition (17 min.)
“Centering prayer is not something new,” Keating tells interviewer Tom Fox. “It is simply an effort to update the apophatic contemplative tradition coming down from Gregory of Nyssa and The Cloud [of Unknowing] and the Carmelites, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.” Keating set about rediscovering this tradition for what he calls “the grass-roots part of the church, the parishes and the schools.”

Episode 2: Consenting to the invitation to transformation (16 min.)
Centering prayer is a gift of grace, Keating says. “But to sit there waiting for it to drop from heaven is not the right approach to awaken something that is already an innate power of grace.” Thus the need for practice and discipline. Read Matthew 6:6. Keating also talks about conversations he has had with philosopher Ken Wilbur.

Episode 3: Encountering silence (19 min.)
Silence is so much an aspect of the spirituality of the old and New Testament. Everything comes out of silence and returns to it. So it should be a part of education,” Fr. Keating said. “It is through the practice of silence that we begin to become vulnerable to the true self and the supernatural organism we receive with grace and baptism. … We think that even preschoolers should be introduced to silence,” Fr. Keating tells Tom Fox. He also discusses original sin.

Episode 4: The need for renewal (19 min.)
Forty years of studying contemplation has led Fr. Keating to this conclusion: “All of Christianity and especially the institutional aspects and structures of it need to be regularly renewed to ensure they are transparent of the original intention of the Gospel,” which he says is “the way of transformed life. He talks about recovering a contemplative dimension for our society that will give us the courage to face pressing social needs as well as the ordinary human problems of our private lives. Fr. Keating also describes a “contemplative Mass.”

Book worth checking out - How (Not) to Speak of God, by Pete Rollins

"The emerging [Christian] thought is a self-acknowledged form of heresy insomuch as it is aware of its failure to describe that of which it speaks. This recognition acts as an effective theological response to fundamentalism, as it unsettles the dark heart of its self-certain power. Very briefly, fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one's beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one's beliefs.

"It can be described as holding a belief system is such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one's own. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing IN God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes ABOUT God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). This does not actually contradict the idea of orthodoxy but rather allow us to understand it in a new light...

"This a/theism is not then some temporary place of uncertainty on the way to spiritual maturity, bur rather is something that operates within faith as a type of heat-inducing friction that prevents our liquid images of the divine from cooling and solidying into idolatrous form."

Advent, Week II: Love - Dorothy Day

From Levellers


“If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.” Dorothy Day.

Mercy Now

Ten propositions on penal substitution, by Kim Fabricius

“If you need a theory to worship Christ, worship your f---ing theory!” Stanley Hauerwas

Follow up to recent Pullman post

The comments after the post are interesting, especially this one from Kim Fabricius:

...You are right, Matt, about the cultural and theological illiteracy of our times which the New Atheists exploit and promote, but the answer is not ecclesiastical denial and meanmindedness, hysteria and picket lines. Rather Christians should own up to the truth in the diatribes of the cultured despisers of religion, especially when it hurts, and do that most counter-cultural thing, publicly repent; point out their half-truths and ignorance, and substantiate those charges of dishonesty; and, above all, proclaim the word of the cross with the power of weakness, not engage in ecclesiastical triumphalism.

In other words, we should do what Dostoevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov. I'd like to see Scorsese take on as a project that greatest of novels on rebellion and faith. That would be a filmic narrative that would piss off New Atheist and Christian right alike - and thus show itself to be right on the money.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007 6:38:00 PM

Great Annie Dillard quote

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”

—Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.

Some Audio links:

NTWrightAudio


Miroslav Volf Lectures


Stanley Hauerwas: Dietrich Bonhoeffer On Lying - Reflections on America

Old Nobodaddy, Christians and The Golden Compass

From: Faith&Theology [blog]

...[Pullman:]“My books are about killing God.” I just hope that The Golden Compass faithfully executes the deicide that the author so imaginatively conceived and elegantly crafted in the novel.

For the death of this God would actually do the church a great service. He is the god Pullman’s mentor and fellow iconoclast William Blake, whose 250th birthday we celebrated last Wednesday, called Old Nobodaddy, who bears as little relation to the God Jesus called Abba as the straw deity that the New Atheists so tediously torch. This god, who is finally defeated in the third book of the trilogy, is a bearded old fart “of terrifying decrepitude, of a face sunken in wrinkles, of trembling hands and a mumbling mouth and rheumy eyes.” He is the object more of ridicule than indignation (one thinks of the satire on idolatry in Isaiah 44).

The real target of Pullman’s animus is not this impotent wretch but his grand inquisitors who deploy religion in the (dis)service of control and repression, the ecclesiastical authority so savagely pilloried by Blake in “The Garden of Love”:

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.

As Rowan Williams, a great fan of Pullman, has written: “What the story makes you see is that if you believe in a mortal God, who can win and lose his power, your religion will be saturated with anxiety – and so with violence. In a sense, you could say that a mortal God needs to be killed.”

But the narrative does more than smash empty idols, expose institutional hypocrisy, and condemn vice – “cruelty, intolerance, zealotry, fanaticism … well, who could quarrel with that?” asks Pullman – it inculcates what are decidedly Christian values. Pullman’s coming-of-age story is articulated in terms of growth in wisdom. Here is the winsome heroine, Lyra, reflecting at the very end of the trilogy on selflessness and truthfulness, the virtues it takes to create anything good, beautiful, and enduring: “We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and brave and patient, and we’ve got to study and think, and work hard, all of us, in our different worlds, and then we’ll build.” If such values are indicative of a “pernicious atheist agenda,” bring on the AOB.

Okay, Pullman’s onslaught is unrelenting, his didacticism can get the better of his art, and for a writer so knowledgeable about a literary tradition steeped in Christian faith – not only Blake and, of course, Milton (“his dark materials” comes from Paradise Lost), but also, among others, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Emily Dickinson – he can be theologically quite obtuse, if not without flashes of insight.

But that’s not the point. The point, for the church, is the embarrassing mini Magisterium of Christian Pharisees and Philistines who prove the point Pullman is making. And the ultimate irony: there is nothing like a good boycott to market a product. Popcorn, anyone?

WHY BANKRUPTCY?

Dialogue # 11

picture: Copyright 2007 www.mmorgenstern.com

One writer asks:

What are the real reasons behind the dioceses filing for Chapter 11 protection? Is it all about money?

Father Tom Doyle and I have served as consultants and expert witnesses in civil cases of clergy abuse in all five dioceses that have so far filed for bankruptcy.

Therefore we were required to review the evidence in the abuse cases facing these dioceses involved in that process. In addition, Tom has served as an expert witness in the bankruptcy proceedings themselves having had to explain how the institutional church owns property.

No diocese states openly that it fears disclosure of scandalous or perhaps criminal behavior contained in documents that any civil trial would expose, but the circumstances provide irrefutable evidence that such is the case. The process of filing for bankruptcy stops all discovery and halts all cases of abuse from going forward.



Is there a possibility that a diocese may go broke and loose everything?

No danger, even remote, of financial disaster exists in any of the dioceses that are appealing for this civil protection. In fact, the proceedings have forced to the surface facts that reveal the dioceses have significant holdings they intentionally covered up, diverted or otherwise underestimated. Between 88 and 95 percent of all the funding for Catholic Charities across the country come from secular and government sources.

The proceedings in the diocese of San Diego are exposing the manipulation of assets and the intrigue surrounding its attempt to justify itself before a federal judge. [Check The San Diego Union Tribune April 2007 by Mark Sauer & Sandi Dolbee] Somehow they overlooked assets of 65 to 400 million dollars. The Federal Judge appointed her own auditor to get the facts straight. The diocese will have to pay for this service.

No diocese has actually declared bankruptcy. They have all filed for protection. In every instance each diocese filed for protection shortly before a civil trial or series of trials for clergy sexual abuse was to start. Every one of those cases would expose some very damning information.

CONTINUE...

See also ”God, Incorporated” in the July 2007 edition of San Diego Magazine.

Atheism's Wrong Turn

[By Damon Linker, The New Republic]

Excerpt: ..."ndeed, the tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open [The God Delusion] will be atheists when they put it down." Exactly how will such conversions be accomplished? Rather than seeking common ground with believers as a prelude to posing skeptical questions, today's atheists prefer to skip right to the refutation. They view the patient back and forth of dialogue--the way of Socrates--as a waste of time.

It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism. Politically speaking, liberalism takes no position on theological questions. One can be a liberal and a believer (as were Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others in the American past and present) or a liberal and an unbeliever (as were Hook, Richard Rorty, and a significantly smaller number of Americans over the years). This is in part because liberalism is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of man--or God. But it is also because modern liberalism derives, at its deepest level, from ancient liberalism--from the classical virtue of liberality, which meant generosity and openness. To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.

It is to accept, in other words, that, although I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not. That, in the end, is what separates the atheism of Socrates from the atheism of the French Revolution...

...Still, the rise of the new atheists is cause for concern--not among the targets of their anger, who can rest secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the religious will, here in America, dwarf the ranks of atheists for the foreseeable future; but rather among those for whom the defense of secular liberalism is a high political priority. Of course, many of these secular liberals are probably the same people who propelled Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens onto the best-seller lists by purchasing their books en masse--people who are worried about the dual threats to secular politics posed by militant Islam and the American religious right. These people are correct to be nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders. The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism.

The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails."

"Considering the pope's new encylical", By Gerald O'Collins | DECEMBER 10, 2007

Richard Sipe's website: "Priests, Celibacy and Sexuality"

Picture - Michael Morgenstern

Very Informative site. Worth bookmarking

What Are Our Voices For?

More wisdom from NonViolentJesus

"And woe unto you if you are torturing your fellow human being. Woe unto you if you are getting rich by providing material support, service, or assistance to the purveyors of torture, for how does it profit a person to gain the whole world but lose his or her soul? Woe unto the politicians who have abused our nation’s fear to find support for torture and who change the definition of torture in order to say with a straight face, 'Americans don’t torture'. Woe unto the politicians who have not spoken out loudly enough to condemn torture. Woe to the religious communities and leaders who have been silent. Woe unto you, for you will have to go to bed each night knowing that you have sinned against humanity and against God." - Ben Daniel

Listen to the words of a soldier trying to follow his faith:

Specialist Joshua Casteel - Listen to the audio clip (or download)

warcomeshome.org


Where is the leadership which should expect from bishops, the shepherds of the people of God? Justice must be enthroned - this is the work of Jesus. 40 years of hermaneutics, Vatican II, and all the rest, and not a single forthright criticism of a war that they admit was in no way justified by just war principles, not as long as it really matters - while the war is in progress.

"For too long the language of morality and sin has been commandeered by those among us who think the primary goal of religion is to regulate human intimacy. People like you and me—that is to say, thoughtful people of faith whose souls are inclined to the work of making the world a better place—we don’t want our religious faithfulness to be confused with prudishness, so we shy away from anything that might look like a pounded pulpit or that might smell like brimstone.

"Brothers and sisters, dear friends, when it comes to torture, we need to lose that inhibition, because how can torture be anything but immoral? And if we cannot condemn as sin that which truly is immoral, then what might our God-given voices be for?Brothers and sisters, dear friends, when it comes to torture, we need to lose that inhibition, because how can torture be anything but immoral? And if we cannot condemn as sin that which truly is immoral, then what might our God-given voices be for?" - Ben Daniel, speech at the headquarters of a company that renders "enemy combatants" to be tortured for the edification and career advancement of American politicians.

Indeed, what is the purpose of spiritual life if it can't be moved by the plight of our brothers and sisters and we are condemned to live in a fairy land of Rapture? For what has God given us minds and hands and hearts if they cannot be moved by a world of starvation caused directly by the corporations that coddle us with obscene and undeserved comfort? Our hearts were not given us so that we could distract them with brainless nonsense while the world burns.

"I am not schooled in national security or in international politics. I am a pastor, and I wouldn’t be a very good one if the promotion of social righteousness were not part of my ministry. What I know about torture is this: it’s not just ineffective, and unpatriotic and illegal, and dangerous. To torture someone is immoral because it is cruel and it is unfair. Torture uses punishment to determine guilt rather than using guilt to determine punishment. Torture desecrates the image of God that is common to all humanity. Torture is a sin." - Ben Daniel

It is as much a mortal sin as abortion, though you don't hear Catholic bishops shaking that tree very often. They have more important things to deal with than the torture of human beings.

"And woe unto you if you are torturing your fellow human being. Woe unto you if you are getting rich by providing material support, service, or assistance to the purveyors of torture, for how does it profit a person to gain the whole world but lose his or her soul? Woe unto the politicians who have abused our nation’s fear to find support for torture and who change the definition of torture in order to say with a straight face, 'Americans don’t torture'. Woe unto the politicians who have not spoken out loudly enough to condemn torture. Woe to the religious communities and leaders who have been silent. Woe unto you, for you will have to go to bed each night knowing that you have sinned against humanity and against God." - Ben Daniel

And you will have to sleep in the sin your silence has nurtured.

"The final word belongs to grace. Grace enables and empowers us to change. The good news is that no matter what the propagators of hatred and fear may tell us, we can reject the sin of torture and so can they. We can just say no. There remains time for the amendment of our national character. By grace we can affirm the sanctity of each human life. By grace we can refuse to live under the illusionary comfort of security that is conceived in cruelty and born of brutality. By grace we may live moral and upright lives." - Ben Daniel

Wake from sin and speak. It is the only true security.

posted by Boyd at 1:05 PM | 0 comments links to this post

ON THE LINE

What happens when a group of activists, priests, celebrities, and students risk arrest to protest U.S. foreign policy in Latin America?

ON THE LINE is an inside look at the people behind one of the largest nonviolent movements in America today: the movement to close the School of the Americas/WHINSEC, a U.S. Army school that trains Latin American soldiers. In a world where politics, passion, and Constitutional rights collide, protesters discuss their activism, the dark side of U.S. foreign policy, and the challenges of protesting since 9/11.

The principal cast includes:

* Martin Sheen, actor
* Susan Sarandon, actor
* Fr. Roy Bourgeois, Founder of School of the Americas Watch
* John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman
* Bob Barr, political analyst and former US Congressman
* Gerry Weber, ACLU-Georgia

Spe Salvi a 'Greatest Hits' collection of core Ratzinger ideas

Brilliant report by JohnAllenJr.:

By John L Allen Jr Daily
Created Nov 30 2007 - 07:44

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York

If one were to compile a list of the core concerns of Joseph Ratzinger, his idees fixes over almost sixty years now of theological reflection, it might look something like this:

• Truth is not a limit upon freedom, but the condition of freedom reaching its true potential;
• Reason and faith need one another – faith without reason becomes extremism, while reason without faith leads to despair;
• The dangers of the modern myth of progress, born in the new science of the 16th century and applied to politics through the French Revolution and Marxism;
• The impossibility of constructing a just social order without reference to God;
• The urgency of separating eschatology, the longing for a “new Heaven and a new earth,” from this-worldly politics;
• Objective truth as the only real limit to ideology and the blind will to power.

All those themes take center stage once again in the encyclical Spe Salvi, released today in Rome. In that sense, one could argue that the text represents a sort of “Greatest Hits” collection of Ratzinger’s most important ideas, developed over a lifetime, and now presented in the form of an encyclical in his role as Pope Benedict XVI.

Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, lent credence to this reading in a Rome news conference this morning, saying that in Spe Salvi “we see very clearly the hand and the style of the author,” describing the encyclical as “absolutely and personally” the pope’s own thought. (In fact, Lombardi said, papal advisers are working on the draft of another encyclical, this one on social themes, and were "surprised" that in the meantime Benedict produced an encyclical more or less entirely on his own.)

One should hasten to add, of course, that Benedict himself would not really see these as “his” ideas, but rather as foundational principles of 2,000 years of Christian teaching and tradition. Yet few figures over the last 60 years have articulated these points with the force, or the political and ecclesiastical consequence, of Joseph Ratzinger.

In essence, the message of Spe Salvi can be expressed this way: If human beings place their hopes for justice, redemption and a better life exclusively in this-worldly forces, whether it’s science, politics, or anything else, they’re lost. The carnage of the 20th century, the pope suggests, illustrates the folly of investing human ideology and technology with messianic expectations.

Instead, ultimate hope – what the pope describes as “the great hope” – lies only in God, because only through the moral and spiritual wisdom acquired through faith can technology and political structures be directed towards ends which are truly human.

As early as 1977, in his book Eschatologie: Tod und ewiges Leben (“Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life”), which Ratzinger once described as his “most thorough work,” the future pope argued that under the impact of Marx, mistaken notions of the Kingdom of God were threatening the integrity of the Christian message. When people confuse the gospel with a political message, he wrote, the distinctively Christian element is lost, “leaving behind nothing but a deceptive surrogate.”

In his 1987 book Church, Ecumenism and Politics, Ratzinger returned to the theme: “Where there is no dualism,” he wrote, meaning a strong distinction between eschatology and politics, “there is totalitarianism.”

The fear that politics could replace the Last Judgment and the afterlife as the focus of Christian hope was also perhaps Ratzinger’s deepest underlying objection to liberation theology, the movement in Latin America in the 1960s, 70s and 80s that sought to align the church with progressive efforts for social change.

Thus it is no surprise in Spe Salvi to see Benedict XVI drawing a sharp distinction between Jesus and social revolutionaries of his era such as Spartacus and Bar-Kochba, nor warning once more that Marx’s “fundamental error” of materialism led to “a trail of appalling destruction.”

The necessary link between reason and faith is also a favorite preoccupation of the pope; it was the heart, for example, of his now-famous lecture at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria on Sept. 12, 2006, that touched off protest in the Islamic world because of Benedict’s citation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor concerning Muhammad.

“Reason needs faith if it is to be completely itself,” Benedict writes in Spe Salvi. “Reason and faith need one another in order to fulfill their true nature and their mission.”

Throughout the 19,000-word encyclical, there are several other vintage Ratzinger touches.

For example, Ratzinger has long pressed the need to re-present basic concepts of the faith to a modern world he regards as jaded by a sort of weary familiarity with Christianity. Thus in Spe Salvi, we find him writing: “We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God.”

Likewise, both as a personal theologian and as pope, Benedict has long said that he has no objection to the theory of evolution as such, but is alarmed by a radically materialistic philosophy that would see human beings as exclusively the random product of an evolutionary process.

“It is not the law of matter and of evolution that have the final say,” he writes in the new encyclical, "but reason, will, love – a Person … Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.”

Many observers have noted that sometimes Benedict the Supreme Pastor and Joseph Ratzinger the exacting theologian sit in uneasy tension with one another, and those contrasting elements of his personality are clearly visible once again in Spe Salvi.

At times, Benedict can be almost poetic, as in this passage attempting to express the notion of eternal life: “It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love,” he writes, “a moment in which time – the before and after – no longer exists.”

In other passages, however, Spe Salvi can read like an essay one might find in a journal of theology of Biblical studies. Benedict critiques an ecumenical translation of the New Testament, for example, one approved by the German Catholic bishops, for offering what he regards as an overly subjective reading of the Greek word hypostasis. The pope prefers the term "substance" arguing that what's meant is not an inner conviction about the faith but rather its objective foundation. Benedict also spends considerable time reflecting on two pairs of Greek terms: hypostasis/hyparchonta and hypomone/hypostole.

Benedict can also be surprisingly ecumenical in his erudition; to correct the translation mentioned above, the pope cites approvingly the work of a liberal German Protestant exegete, Helmut Köster. (Köster, by the way, was a student of Rudolf Bultmann, the liberal exegete who developed the idea of “demythologizing” the Bible, and a longtime bête noire of Ratzinger’s.)

Benedict is, by his own admission, a convinced Augustinian, and no one could miss that in Spe Salvi: Augustine is cited no fewer than 13 times, often at some length.

Finally, Benedict the intellectual is also a man deeply respectful of pious popular tradition, and this too shines through Spe Salvi. For example, towards the end of the encyclical, Benedict recommends a return to the custom of “offering up” one’s small daily sufferings in prayer to God, writing that even if there were “exaggerations and perhaps unhealthy applications” of the idea, it still offers Christians a way to insert small inconveniences “into Christ’s great compassion.”

Benedict XVI is a classic music lover who, at age 80, still enjoys passing time at a piano keyboard. To evoke another musical metaphor, Spe Salvi amounts to Ratzingerian “variations on a theme,” reworking and refining key leitmotifs of his thought. The question is whether the new score in Spe Salvi will also catch the ears of those who, to date, have not yet started humming the tune.

HOPE

Full text of Pope Benedict XVI's second encyclical, Spe Salvi: On Christian Hope

Spe Salvi a 'Greatest Hits' collection of core Ratzinger ideas, by John Allen Jr. Nov 30, 2007. National Catholic Reporter

NonviolentJesusBlog

Go to the blog and read his posts. This is just a sample:

"When we contemplate, not the ephemeral regimes of Republican or Democratic flavor, but the powers of global dominance for which they act as marketing representatives, it is almost impossible not to succumb to a sense of futility. In fact, they have labored long and hard to instill this sense of impotence in us, the idea that there is no alternative to the everlasting dominance of savage capitalism - the end of history, indeed. But the weapons God has given us are the same as those which the early Christians used against an equally powerful empire. And he will not abandon us now either.

We begin by acting on our conscience - there is no substitute for action, but the action must be supported by the twin pillars of prayer and strategic analysis. Prayer must be sincere, but the strategic analysis must penetrate to the depth of the power relations that we face. Otherwise, we will be satisfied with small concessions while the real crimes continue...."

Western Christians can learn much from Eastern Christians, says pope

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Christianity is not and never has been a uniquely European phenomenon, and Christians of the West can learn much from the cultural expressions of Eastern Christians, especially those of the early church, Pope Benedict XVI said.

"Today it is a common opinion that Christianity is a European religion that exported European culture to other countries, but the reality is much more complicated and complex," he said Nov. 28 at his weekly general audience.

"It is not only that the roots of the Christian religion are found in Jerusalem, in the Old Testament, in the Semitic world and Christianity is constantly nourished by these Old Testament roots," he said, "but the expansion of Christianity in the first centuries" went simultaneously West and East.

In Europe, but also throughout the Middle East and over to India, "Christianity with a different culture was formed," he said. Christians in the East lived the faith "with their own expressions and cultural identities," demonstrating "the cultural plurality of the one faith from the beginning."

With fewer than 8,000 people present, the weekly gathering was held inside the Vatican audience hall, offering greater protection from the cold and wind for the pope, whose voice was hoarse.

The pope's main audience talk focused on the life, teaching and poetry of St. Ephraem the Syrian, a fourth-century deacon.

"He remained a deacon throughout his life and embraced virginity and poverty," the pope said.


Pope Benedict, whose new encyclical on the virtue of hope was to be released at the Vatican Nov. 30, said St. Ephraem was a model of the Christian virtues: "faith, hope -- this hope that allows us to live poor and as virgins in this world, placing all one's hope in the Lord -- and, finally, charity to the point of self-giving in the care of victims of the plague," which he contracted and which caused his death.

In his hymns and poetry, St. Ephraem offered theological reflections using images "taken from nature, daily life and the Bible."

His use of song, especially liturgical song, the pope said, was an effective means of religious education because "precisely by singing, celebrating, praising God, we see not only the beauty, but the truth of the faith and we encounter the truth in person, Christ."

St. Ephraem's reflections on God the creator, he said, are very important.

The saint taught that "nothing in creation is isolated. The world, alongside the Scriptures, is God's Bible. By using his freedom in an erroneous way, man upsets the order of the cosmos," the pope said.

- - -

Editor's Note: The Vatican text of the pope's remarks in English is available online at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20071128_en.html.

Quotations from AnneRice.com

From Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler
“…in Jesus Christ God has absolutely accepted the finite and communicated himself to it in an absolute manner…”
Dictionary of Theology, p. 1

From Walter Cardinal Kasper
“Jesus is different from John the Baptist. He does not lead a life of withdrawn asceticism apart form the world. He does not cut himself off and retreat into a monastery like the Qumran sect. He approaches people and lives among them. In one sense he could be said to be an enlightened secular man. To him the world is God’s good creation; and its things are good gifts to mankind. He is not too proud to eat with the rich or to be supported by pious women (Lk 8.2-3). Nor, on the other hand, is he a ‘liberal’ like the Sadducees. He does not think he can satisfy his religious obligations by the correctness of the orthodox, and specific cultic and ritual observances. The will of God takes over totally. Many of his sayings reveal a total claim and fundamental seriousness. He is concerned about everything. This ‘abandoning all’ leads him to a break with his family (Mk 3.20-21; 31-35), makes him homeless in this world (Mt 8.20). But he is no zealot or fanatic. His zeal is never brutish. And he is different from the Pharisees. He is not pious in the average meaning of the word. He teaches neither religious technique nor moral casuistry. He calls God his Father, whose love breaks down all categories and frees people from anxiety (Mt 6.25-34).”
Jesus the Christ, p. 68

From Ellis Rivkin
“In a word, the essence of the Jewish experience has been God-seeking, and God-seeking has meant coming to a more profound knowledge of the way God works in the world, in human nature and in the process of human interaction with nature. Through such a growing understanding and historical process, not only the Jewish people but mankind itself may be able to achieve the glorious end of days envisaged by Isaiah. The belief that God teaches can be juxtaposed against the myth of Sisyphus that portrays the gods as mocking, and not found wanting.”
The Unity Principal, p. 326

DISCLAIMER

Do not think that the articles posted, books recommended etc. give any insight into the state of my life or spiritual development. Unfortunately this is 90% head knowledge for me. I have the hardest time integrating any of it into my life and actually living it...


["... I would rather experience repentance in my soul than know how to define it....

...Whoever sets his mind on anything other than what serves his salvation is a senseless fool. A barrage of words does not make the soul happy, but a good life gladdens the mind and a pure conscience generates a bountiful confidence in God...

...The more things you know and the better you know them, the more severe will your judgment be, unless you have also lived a holier life. Do not boast about the learning and skills that are yours; rather, be cautious since you do possess such knowledge...

Thomas Kempis "The Imitation of Christ", Chapter 1

Fire of Love: Encountering the Holy Spirit

Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace

Our Days Are Numbered

[art: Michael O'Brien]















"We do not know how many more days we have left to live. Consequently, it is better to live one day at a time. We must approach everything with great involvement and with the love that God expects from us. At the same time, we must do everything as if tomorrow we will have to move on and leave it all behind."

(Open Wide the Door to Christ, pg. 161)

25,000 protest the SOA/WHINSEC and U.S. policy

[And not a peep from the corporate media...]

From VoxNova

The annual protest at Ft. Benning in Georgia to close the SOA/WHINSEC continues to grow. This past weekend, 25,000 protesters, including Catholic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich, made the trip to Georgia. Read reports here and here.

Michael J. Iafrate Says:
November 19, 2007 at 10:40 pm

Strange, isn’t it, that it is so silent considering the media’s recent sudden realization that — gasp! — torture is a real issue. Recognizing this movement now would show the media’s own complicity in remaining silent on the issue of torture for decades. The media will recognize torture as a mere election year issue, but on its own terms, not facing up to the fact that torture is as American as apple pie.

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Trial transcript: Day 5 ((September 30), PM Session, Part 1
John F.Haught, PH.D., called as a witness, having been duly sworn or affirmed, testified as follows:

Continue

The suffering-servant God

"The mature Christian does not expect an all-powerful God to dramatically break into time/space to manipulate nature in marvelous ways. I don't doubt that he could, if he chose to, but that's not how the suffering-servant God works. The earth and its future is a human project. It's on us humans, not God. But nothing we humans do is good unless it's inspired by grace. And that's the key to prayer--not to ask God to get it done, but to ask for the wisdom or inspiration that will enable us to get it done. And there is help there for us if we choose to avail ourselves of it."

Jack, at "After The Future"

Beyond Liberal & Conservative (Updated)

From Jack at "After The Future"

November 11, 2007
Beyond Liberal & Conservative (Updated)

From Frank Rich, "The Coup at Home:

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).

Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.

Anybody who is still stuck in the liberal/conservative dichotomy is hopelessly incapable of understanding what's happening to us. We're now into the American/unAmerican dichotomy, in which 'American' stands for honor, decency, and the rule of law, while unAmerican stands for the kind of corruption and brutality in the name of national security that has overtaken the GOP. As Rich says earlier in this column:

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

Democracies are certainly capable of electing governments that will do away with democracy. It's happened elsewhere, and while most Americans don't want to face up to it, it's happening here. Lots of people understand this, but it has been troubling to me that it has taken those Americans who think of themselves as moderates and principled conservatives so long to catch on. There are a few like Andrew Sullivan and John Cole, both GOP cheerleaders earlier on, who have publicly and repentantly repudiated their earlier administration support. They both understand that the Republican Party no longer stands for what they thought it did, even remotely. Why they ever thought this particular group was trustworthy is another question, but both have become ardent critics, and they should be credited for not allowing their good sense and decency from being obscured by their ideology. ...CONTINUE READING JACK'S POST

Mindblowing..."Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace"

Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace (Theology in Global Perspective) (Paperback)

By Mary J. Miller (Iowa and Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

"This book may take our breath away." So states the cover blurb from Walter Brueggemann on "Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace," released on April 17, 2007 by Daniel G. Groody. The basic premise is, metaphorically, that the global family has booked passage and is now aboard the ship of globalization and there is no turning back to the shore. The question we must ask ourselves, as passengers on this ship, is, "who is at the helm and where are we going?" As Gustavo Gutierrez quips, "Being against globalization is like being against electricity." We can't stop the ship, and one would question the wisdom of wanting to, but the issues of who's driving and where will we end up are legitimate.

The book begins by offering an overview of the dual nature of globalization--its inherent propensity for good, such as the triumphs of technology, and for ill, such as the tragedy of poverty. Perhaps more importantly, chapter one details where we have sailed on this ship so far. This chapter seeks to give a realistic picture of the world today and paints that picture by using the most current statistics available. These statistics were gathered from sources such as the World Bank, the United Nations annual Human Development and World Development reports, and the World Institute for Development Economic Research. It is staggering to learn that 19 percent of the global population lives on less than $1 per day, 48 percent live on less than $2 per day, 75 percent live on less than $10 per day, and, according to the World Bank, two-thirds of the population of the planet lives in poverty. The weight of these income disparities is compounded when one looks at the unequal distribution of wealth and our disordered spending patterns. According to an article in the December 2006 issue of "The Economist," half of all wealth is held by only 2 percent of the world's adults. The world spends almost as much money on toys and games as the poorest 20 percent of the population earns in a year, and four times as much on alcohol as on international development aid. The troubling area of military spending is also addressed.

The world picture, from the perspective of poverty and need is indeed bleak, but Professor Groody does not leave us in the grip of its reality with no hope. He is convinced that, while fully aware of the abuses committed in the name of religion throughout history, the gift theology can bring to the process of globalization is a navigation system that has the potential to guide us to a place of solidarity and peace, where if globalization is left to itself or to those leaders who are only motivated by profit we may run aground on the icebergs of greed. As Groody notes, we are doing theological reflection all the time, but he argues that to find a place of human solidarity we must undergo a conversion from "money-theism" to monotheism. The remaining eight chapters of the book deal with how the various sub-disciplines of theology inform the process of globalization.

* Chapter two details the core narratives of the Bible--the Narrative of the Empire, the Narrative of the Poor, the Narrative of Yahweh, the Narrative of Idolatry, and the Narrative of the Gospel, integrating them all with the Narrative of the Passover.
* Chapter three challenges idolatry and excessive wealth through the words of the early church writers.
* Chapter four lays out an overview of Catholic social teaching with an acronym ("A God of Life") that provides a framework on which to hang the basic tenets. There are also several very useful charts that detail the documents of the universal and regional churches by categories of year, author, context, and key concept.
* Chapter five consists of a short section (five or six pages) on the basic social teachings of each of the major, non-Judeo-Christian, world religions--Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Bahai Faith, and African Indigenous religions. Here we see that social justice is not unique to Christianity.
* In chapter six the lives of five contemporary models of justice are briefly chronicled: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, and Oscar Romero. Attention is paid especially to their foundational experiences, the major metaphor of their life, their operative theology, and their core contribution to justice.
* Chapter seven reflects on God through the perspective of the poor by looking at liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor. This chapter is an especially helpful read for anyone who wishes to understand what is meant by these two terms and the position of the Vatican on liberation theology. The global perspective is readily apparent again in this chapter as attention is paid to Black, Hispanic, Feminist, and Asian liberation theology.
* Chapter eight concerns the rite of the liturgy, and justice as living in right relationships with God, self, others, and the environment. This chapter also has several nice charts that are helpful in linking the sacraments to social teaching by way core issue.
* The final chapter on spirituality and transformation beautifully sums up the book by looking to the spiritual disciplines which can strengthen us for doing the work of justice in the world: fasting, prayer, community, solidarity, nature, simplicity, recollection, and Sabbath.

Each chapter begins with a relevant story, and ends with a set of questions that would be helpful for personal reflection, group discussion, or classroom use, and a detailed bibliography for further reading and study.

I recommend Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice for upper level undergrads and graduate students in theology, peace studies, political science, ethics and justice, and economics and business, as well as justice groups, and the general reader interested in this vital and timely topic. Groody has managed to research and write a compelling treatise on global injustice without conveying a bleak and hopeless message. At its core, this book seeks to respond to the deeper issues of the human heart that globalization has largely left unexplored--questions related to belonging and loneliness, good and evil, peace and division, healing and suffering, meaning and meaninglessness, hope and despair, love and apathy, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, and ultimately life and death. He is not interested in overwhelming readers with guilt, but rather with guiding readers to examine our personal and corporate lives and motivations, all the while encouraging us to think beyond ourselves to the needs of our brothers and sisters in the global family. The book is clear and well documented, exquisitely written, and sings a wonderful melody of the gratuitousness of God that is both a gift to and a demand on our lives.

Brilliant post by Jeff at Aún Estamos Vivos

Monday, November 12, 2007
Tagging Myself For a Meme
The So-Called "Extraordinary" Meme

I'm tagging myself for this meme for two reasons. The first is that I would never be tagged for it otherwise. You see, the originators and devotees are waiting for people like me to "die off" before they would ever consider it.

Second... There really wasn't anything wrong with this meme in principle, but it took a nasty twist at the end, and I'd like to stick up for the maligned individual in question. I don't know if the last question was on the original meme or not, I think it was an accretion, but it epitomizes the ugliness, chortling malevolance, and mean-spiritedness that has unfortunately become the dominant characteristic of the posts and combox responses to be found in the Catholic blogging world today. It sickens me.

As I alluded earlier on Crystal's blog, I'm sick and tired of people who are still wet behind their ears from their chrismation presuming to tell people who've lived their entire lives in the faith what authentic Catholicism is and what it is not.

I'm also frustrated by all these young traditionalists, "re-discovering" their Catholicism on some apologetics website within the last two or three years imagining a so-called Golden Age prior ot Vatican II, either trashing the Second Vatican Council outright, or giving it the most tepid endorsement possible, characterizing it as a sort of failed "pastoral" council that didn't change any dogma thank goodness, and should be quietly jettisoned. Another variant urges people to look at the "letter" of the Vatican II texts rather than the "demonically-inspired 'Spirit of the Council'". Anyone old enough to remember, on the other hand, who actually happened to be around in those years, is spurned as a gray-haired liturgical-dancing loving fogey who presided over the "ruin" of the Church, which is lying in shambles, and waiting for the young traditionalists to fix it. The fogeys are urged to die off as soon as possible.

It's more likely that the young trads will shrink it down to a curious museum piece, if they get their way.

The truth of the matter is, every single indicator that worries them so much was already present in the years before Vatican II. Europe was already in a crisis of faith. That's why the Council was held. That's why Henri de Lubac, a peritus at the Council, wrote The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, seeking to explore why the Church had already lost the hearts and souls of so many of the faithful. As for the US, it was living a hermetically-sealed ghetto Catholicism in a hostile Protestant society. Once Catholics became educated, affluent, and mainstream, those very elements, along with the secular upheavals in the sixties and seventies themselves, contributed to leading us where we are today.

The young radtrads cry, "Look at the wreckage in the Church after Vatican II! Wow! Great idea that was! What fruits of the Council! It's Springtime!"

I answer, "World War I - 9.7 million military deaths, and 10 million civilian deaths. World War II - 25 million military deaths and 50 million civilian deaths... Yes, It was Summertime before Vatican II!" That's not counting all the other wars around the planet in the Twentieth Century. What kind of Christian continent was that? That Latin Mass certainly was a panacea for everything that was ailing Western Civilization, wasn't it? It certainly was doing the job, obviously.... If anything, the Council was held about 10 years too late, putting it up against the perfect storm of the sixties.

As for these youngsters who are bitter about their whiffle-catechesis while growing up, angry that all they got in their classes was word-search puzzles and smiley-faces, I hear you excorciating the nuns and laywomen who taught you. Well, I remember how difficult is was for them to educate the spoiled brats in your generation, because you had no manners and you had no attention span for anything much deeper. Don't blame those educators for your woeful lack of knowledge. If you were brought up without the Faith in your households, it was the fault of your parents, not the fault of the educators who worked their hearts out trying to get through to you. Just because you're jealous of the vitality of Evangelical Protestantism in comparison to how you view Catholicism these days, don't blame the educators. Look closer to home. Truth is, your parents likely checked out with Humanae Vitae (when Paul VI listened to his curial mandarins instead of the laity) , which is why you weren't brought up like they were themselves.

I consider myself to be in neither the traditionalist nor the liberal camp. I must say, however, that I can certainly understand the frustration on the part of progressives in recent decades. I don’t have a problem with Latin. I don’t have a problem with the historical legacies of our Church, although I do agree with traditionalists that Vatican II was in fact a revolution. It was not a revolution in the sense that they mean it, in that the values of the French Revolution infected the Church. It was a revolution in the sense that the assembled bishops finally stood up like men and acted like real bishops, and were not cowed by the coterie of extreme anti-modernist integrists in the Roman Curia who equated the Church with themselves. The bishops had the support of the Pope in that regard, at least with John XXIII. The Curia has been fighting a rear-guard action in a restorationist effort ever since. The Curia was never reformed as it should have been. They just waited for the bishops and the theologians to go home, then it was back to business as usual. Now that the Church is in a mess, they point the accusing finger at others rather than themselves, casting aspersion and blame on the very council they worked so hard to scuttle.

I understand the frustration of progessives on matters related to the liturgy in particular, because a lot of this was SSPX-driven, and there is a lot more wrong with the SSPX than the illicit consecration of a handful of bishops in defiance of the Pope. In addition to their non-acceptance of the Council is their obnoxious anti-semitism (which should be roundly condemned by all Catholics everywhere) and their inane, crackpot theories around Judeo/Masonic/Communist plots. These Jansenists are still obsessed with the French Revolution and the Ancien Regime. These are the people Benedict is extending an olive branch to, while progressives, concerned about more lay involvement in the governance of the Church, a wider role for women, a reconsideration of mandatory celibacy, and a recognition of positive aspects of Liberation Theology, are shunted to the side, or investigated, censured and disciplined.

Anyhow, here's this meme...

Contine reading Jeff's post

Great new book: "The Divine Milieu Explained: A Spirituality for the 21st Century"

67/68. Who was this guy called Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? Why is he Famous in the Scientific Community?

From Are Jesuits Catholic?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a visionary French Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher, who spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution. In this endeavor he became absolutely enthralled with the possibilities for humankind, which he saw as heading for an exciting convergence of systems, an "Omega point" where the coalescence of consciousness will lead us to a new state of peace and planetary unity. Long before ecology was fashionable, he saw this unity he saw as being based intrinsically upon the spirit of the Earth:

"The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth." Teilhard de Chardin passed away a full ten years before James Lovelock ever proposed the "Gaia Hypothesis" which suggests that the Earth is actually a living being, a collosal biological super-system. Yet Chardin's writings clearly reflect the sense of the Earth as having its own autonomous personality, and being the prime center and director of our future -- a strange attractor, if you will -- that will be the guiding force for the synthesis of humankind.

"The phrase 'Sense of the Earth' should be understood to mean the passionate concern for our common destiny which draws the thinking part of life ever further onward. The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion.

"We have reached a crossroads in human evolution where the only road which leads forward is towards a common passion. . . To continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the Spirit of the Earth to its limits."

To this end, he suggested that the Earth in its evolutionary unfolding, was growing a new organ of consciousness, called the noosphere. The noosphere is analogous on a planetary level to the evolution of the cerebral cortex in humans. The noosphere is a "planetary thinking network" -- an interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global net of self-awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary communication. At the time of his writing, computers of any merit were the size of a city block, and the Internet was, if anything, an element of speculative science fiction. Yet this evolution is indeed coming to pass, and with a rapidity, that in Gaia time, is but a mere passage of seconds. In these precious moments, the planet is developing her cerebral cortex, and emerging into self-conscious awakening. We are indeed approaching the Omega point that Teilhard de Chardin was so excited about.

This convergence however, though it was predicted to occur through a global information network, was not a convergence of merely minds or bodies -- but of heart, a point that he made most fervently.

"It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . Humanity. . . is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?"

In his productive lifetime, Teilhard de Chardin wrote many books, which include the following: LET ME EXPLAIN
THE APPEARANCE OF MAN
THE DIVINE MILIEU
THE FUTURE OF MAN
HOW I BELIEVE
HYMN OF THE UNIVERSE
LETTERS FROM A TRAVELLER
LETTERS TO LEONTINE ZANTA
THE MAKING OF A MIND
MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
SCIENCE AND CHRIST
THE VISION OF THE PAST
WRITINGS IN TIME OF WAR
BUILDING THE EARTH
Most of these quotes were taken from Building the Earth, and The Phenomenon of Man, but as I no longer have a copy, but only old notes, I can't quote exact page numbers.

by Anodea Judith, Dec. 96.

from: http://www.gaiamind.com/Teilhard.html
more on Teilhard de Chardin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin

posted by sonoftheprodigal at 8:43 PM 3 comments

Chris Rock - How To Not Get Your Ass Kicked By The Police

Boomer Culpability (Updated)

From the blog 'After the Future'

October 21, 2007

MZ in response to my "Soft Tryranny" post asked what I thought about boomer culpability in getting us where we are. I'll share a few thoughts here, but what do other boomers think? Non-boomers--what's your take on the responsibility of your elders in getting us all into this fix?

I'd say first of all, the boomer generation is no different than any other except that it was young during an unusual--perhaps aberrational--moment in history. The technocracy trembled a little during that moment, but it didn't take long for it to recover and to reassert its control. Some boomers were affected by an awakening to new possibility that the sixties pointed to, but most in my generation were not affected. There's a reason Nixon pushed for the voting age to be lowered to 18 in 1970--he knew most young people would vote for him, and they did in '72.

As a young man, I wanted to believe that the creative burst that manifested in the sixties represented the introduction of a new cultural era, and I searched everywhere to find people to connect with who shared that hope. I went to meetings of the SDS and other radical left groups and was for the most part disgusted by the egoism, anger, and hedonism that seemed to be their animating spirit. It became clear that the idealism I was looking for would not be found there because for the most part the people in my generation who were leading the student movements didn't have it. They were driven primarily by narcissism and fear of the draft. The technocracy finally figured this out and adjusted by endorsing sexual license and taking away the draft. I learned then that the New Left in this country had its head up its ass then, and nothing much has changed since insofar as its ghost still dominates political discourse on the left.

There were and are exceptions. I admired what Saul Alinsky and his serious disciples were able to achieve. I admired the for the most part the sober analysis of Noam Chomsky, and there are several bloggers in the Chomsky "school" to whom I refer from time to time. But the closest thing I found to what I was looking for was in the Christian social activism of Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, and I admired what Daniel Berrigan was trying to do, and the liberation theology movement in Latin America. These people were all for real. I was influenced by the hope for a Church "devoid of means of power" envisioned by the brothers of Taize (Rest in peace, Brother Eric) went to Yale to study theology, worked as a book editor, and then faded away to live on the margins of the technocracy in the late eighties and nineties, allowing myself to become preoccupied by family and other local concerns as it became clearer that whatever the sixties were, they were a moment that had come and gone.

I woke up to the fact that while the American ideal is real, it has had a relatively weak influence in American history. The American spirit has mostly been a celebration of unrestrained greed and powerlust. Looking back on it now, it would appear that the only lasting effect of the sixties was to allow unrestrained sexuality join up with unrestrained greed and power. The technocracy is indifferent to sexual behavior or even promotes destroying traditional restraints. Sex keeps us all distracted. Better from the technocracy's point of view that we should be preoccupied with sexual rights than with political or economic rights.

If "freedom" becomes primarily identified with sexual freedom, not a problem for the technocracy. Whatever the the debate team pros and cons regarding abortion, its promotion as a technological solution to a deeply human and morally complex problem always bothered me and should have bothered more on the serious left, which was so easily co-opted by the technocracy on this issue. No fuss, no muss--so hygienic. I have always seen abortion as cognate with the technocracy's soul-numbing agenda, and it's no wonder that the narcissism of the left blinded them to that aspect of it. It shouldn't be surprising that abortion was enthusiastically approved by the elites in the technocracy and their children in my generation. Stupid sex without life consequences--cool. And it fits in so well with the technocracy's agenda to trivialize, demystify, and dehumanize us.

If the sixties had a political focus beginning the attempt to analyze and understand the technocracy's power, the seventies gave up on that project, focussed on its new sexual liberation toy, my generation and the tweener generation born in the thirties and the war years thus distracted averted their eyes from the more important developments taking place in the economic and political spheres. The tweeners and the boomers were essentially bought off with drugs, sex, and rock 'n roll, our late-modern version of Roman bread and circuses. And people on the left today wonder why they can't mobilize opposition to the technocratic beast? Our generation and those that followed us haven't even a shred of the discipline or the willingness to sacrifice and fight that would be required to face it down. In that we're all culpable. We're soft, and that's the way the technocracy likes us.

So are we boomers culpable more than others? Sure we were too easily bought off (Remember Jerry Rubin?), but it's hard for me to imagine what the leaders of our generation could have done differently. Is it realistic to believe that our generation could have dismantled the military industrial technocracy before 1989? I don't think so. The moment for that would have been in the fifties when we were kids, but the cold-war hysteria of our parents' 'greatest' generation made that an impossibility. And everyone in power at that time believed that the only way to keep the prosperity machine running was by feeding the military-industrial beast.

I suggested that our generation grew up in a historically aberrational era, and what made it so was its historically unprecedented affluence so quickly after a time of such horror and suffering. It was a dizzying time, and no one wanted to mess with success.The lingering fear of a return to the horrors of the 30s and 40s made it psychologically impossible for our parents' generation to consider starving the beast rather than to give it everything it demanded. As a result it became the fat, insatiable horror it is today. Sanity was an impossible option because the preservation of American prosperity and power was the only real option, so American society adjusted to the madness and called it normal.

And so after 1989 we elected for the first time one of our own. He is the boomer paradigm: a patina of idealism thinly coating crude instinctuality, ambition, and a ready willingness to serve the technocratic beast created in the forties and fifties. The technocracy prefers Republicans, but it can work with housetrained Democrats. And Clinton pretty much did everything he was told (as will his wife). His boomer VP, Al Gore, though compromised and complicit in the system, was still the better man in which genuine idealism had not been completely squeezed out of him. But the sincerity of his idealism is precisely what disqualified him from being elected. The beast does not tolerate genuine idealism, only its appearance.

And that's how it stands. Washington has become Babylon on the Potomac, a place attractive primarily to the power depraved, the money depraved, or the sexually depraved. No truly decent person could thrive there, and any person naive enough to think differently and who goes there with the idea to change things is quickly disillusioned and leaves, adapts, or in some rare cases makes a stand for principle, usually futile That's why Mukasey's getting a pass. That's why FISA is being dismantled. That's why we lost habeas corpus. That's why if Cheney/Bush decide to attack Iran, congress will get on the bandwagon.

That's what inside-the-Beltway politicians and media understand that the rest of us don't: nothing really matters except feeding the beast. Even the decent ones would say: "Unless you live in the belly of the beast, you cannot have any realistic idea what it's like to work in such an environment. Criticize all you want, unless you're here, you have no idea how things work and what's possible." I understand that, and that's why I don't believe there's any changing things from inside the system--pressure has to be brought from outside.

That kind of pressure is not likely to be brought against this system any time soon--certainly not by the boomer generation. So what is there to be done? the typical American might ask. They might quite reasonably answer: Not much, so why pay attention? Might as well enjoy the bread and circuses while they last. That's pretty much all you can do until the whole thing sooner or later collapses of its own corrupt weight as these systems inevitably do. Katrina was just a shot across the bow. We're evolving into Brazil where the elites will be safe and comfortable within their plushly appointed, Blackwater-guarded, gated communities, and the rest of us will be living in various versions of New Orleans.

So I think the idealism of the sixties was always something of a sham. Deep-seated, sincere Idealism is always a minority position in every generation. In that respect the boomers are no better or worse than any other generation. Maybe future generations will do better.

Update: Some might think my argument about the bloated beast is the same as the Libertarian argument to shrink government. The size of the government is not the issue, but whose interests it serves, and ours has ceased to serve the common good, serving instead the forces that have gradually transformed us into a militaristic surveillance state. Any government-shrinking Libertarian who supported the invasion of Iraq or approves the militarization of our economy over the last sixty years wants opposite things at the same time. Ron Paul seems to get that. I'm not sure so-called libertarian conservatives like Sullivan do. I don't buy into Paul's Libertarianism--I think it leads inevitably to the Brazilification of the country whether it's intended or not--but I would vote for him in a heartbeat if the only other choice was Hillary.

October 21, 2007 at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)