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