SpongeBob welcome at UCC

Joining the animated fray, the United Church of Christ today (Jan. 24) said that Jesus' message of extravagant welcome extends to all, including SpongeBob Squarepants - the cartoon character that has come under fire for allegedly holding hands with a starfish.

"Absolutely, the UCC extends an unequivocal welcome to SpongeBob," the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC's general minister and president, said, only partly in jest. "Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we."

For that matter, Thomas explained, the 1.3-million-member church, if given the opportunity, would warmly receive Barney, Big Bird, Tinky-Winky, Clifford the Big Red Dog or, for that matter, any who have experienced the Christian message as a harsh word of judgment rather than Jesus' offering of grace.

The UCC's welcome comes in the wake of laughable accusations by James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, that the popular SpongeBob and other well-known cartoon characters are crossing "a moral line" by stressing tolerance in a national We Are Family Foundation-sponsored video that will be distributed to U.S. schools on March 11, 2005.

Later, an assistant to Dobson called SpongeBob's participation in the video "insidious."

Thomas said, on the contrary, it is Dobson who is crossing the moral line for sending the mistaken message that Christians do not value tolerance and diversity as important religious values.

"While Dobson's silly accusation makes headlines, it's also one more concrete example of how religion is misused over and over to promote intolerance over inclusion," Thomas said. "This is why we believe it is so important that the UCC speak the Gospel in an accent not often heard in our culture, because far too many experience the cross only as judgment, never as embrace."

Dobson, despite his often-outrageous viewpoints, is arguably one of the most oft-heard religious voices in popular culture today. Through his Focus on the Family media empire, Dobson produces daily commentaries that appear widely on television and radio stations across the United States, often times as "public service announcements."

Meanwhile, the UCC's recently released 30-second paid television commercial - produced to underscore the denomination's belief that Jesus didn't turn anyone away - has been rejected by two major television networks for being "too controversial."

"Resistance to our message is formidable," Thomas says, "because we're cutting against the prevailing grain of a society that is afraid of the stranger, suspicious of difference and easily seduced by narrowly defined theological boundaries."

The 1.3-million-member United Church of Christ, with national offices in Cleveland, has almost 6,000 local churches in the United States and Puerto Rico. It was formed by the 1957 union of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

For more information on the "We Are Family" children's video, visit www.wearefamilyfoundation.org.

...from: SpongeBob receives 'unequivocal welcome' from United Church of Christ

the invisible kingdom of Satan

It seems to me that if the Democrats are going to be able to work up a new set of attitudes and values for their future candidates, it might not be a bad idea to do a little more creative thinking about the question for which they have had, up to now, naught but puny suggestions - which is how do you pick up a little of the fundamentalists' vote.

If by 2008, the Democrats hope to come near to a meaningful fraction of such voters, they will have to find candidates and field workers who can spread the word down South - that is, find the equivalent of Democratic missionaries to work on all those good people who may be in awe of Jehovah's wrath, but love Jesus, love Jesus so much more. Worked upon with enough zeal, some of the latter might come to recognize that these much-derided liberals live much more closely than the Republicans in the real spirit of Jesus. Whether they believe every word of Scripture or not, it is still these liberals rather than the Republicans who worry about the fate of the poor, the afflicted, the needy, and the disturbed. These liberals even care about the well-being of criminals in our prisons. They are more ready to save the forests, refresh the air of the cities and clean up the rivers. It might be agonizing for a good fundamentalist to vote for a candidate who did not read the Scriptures every day, yet some of them might yet be ready to say: I no longer know where to place my vote. I have joined the ranks of the undecided.

....read it all: America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan, by Norman Mailer, Sunday Times essay re-published at Common Dreams, 23 January 2005.

"connecting religion with a progressive agenda"

Politicized religion has played a transformative, progressive role in the history of the United States. The American Revolution was prepared by the first 'Great Awakening' in the United States, in which populist preachers crisscrossed the country, bringing Christians of different nations, classes, colonies, and even races into concert, based not on reading well but on an ecstatic, visceral, common faith. The struggle for the abolition of slavery was made possible by the religiously inspired daring of Unitarians, who not only agitated against slavery but sometimes risked their lives to escort African Americans to freedom. The Civil Rights movement grew out of devout black Baptist churches in which the Hebrews' flight from Pharaoh was a prophetic tale.

Can the Democrats re-take America's religious heartland? That hinges on connecting religion with a progressive agenda. And that will require a transformation of American Christianity, a reaching out to those religious men and women who understand justice, tolerance, and anti-colonialism as central to Jesus' public mission. American Christians have a history, one that is not over. If they did not feel reviled and dismissed as obscurantist no-nothings, they might respond to a spiritual politics from the progressive side. They know their Bibles.

The elements for a reversal are there. Bush has put together a coalition of religious conservatives and the monied elite. Yet, if one looks at the texts that animate American Christians, one sees a deep distrust, and indeed, hostility to international capitalism. The Left Behind series is the single most popular book series in America, probably in American history. It details the Rapture, the moment that Christ brings up the saved to Heaven, leaving behind those who are likely damned. It celebrates love, true love, the kind of love between a man and a woman, they argue, that can only be had through religious faith. But it also warns of the powers of international finance, of monies out of control, powers that provide the wordly vehicle for the anti-Christ. That second moment contains a rich populist vein that, while vulnerable to anti-Semitism, is also a potential source to critique a country whose sovereignty is being compromised by the international economic forces to which the Republicans would deliver us. The South Dakotan populism that defeated the Jaguar-driving Daschle distrusts big money.

And finally there is the issue of family values. We can tie their agenda to ours. There is, after all, accumulating evidence that abortion has been rising under President Bush because low wages and the absence of affordable health care make it too economically painful to bring a baby to term.

....read it all: When Jesus Votes by Roger Friedland, Tikkun, Jan/Feb 2005 issue

I have a dream

As published in Counterpunch, 17 January 2005:

Where Lip Service is Not an Option
Martin Luther King and the Christian Left

by Greg Moses

All religions, said Simone de Beauvoir, have "embarrassing flexibility on a basis of rigid concepts." Practitioners and believers who swear to core principles find themselves fighting each other from opposite extremes of the political spectrum.

At the time she said it, in the second chapter of The Second Sex, Beauvoir had three great religions in mind: Christianity, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis. In each case there were right wingers and left wingers then, and in each case there are right and left wingers still.

Today, as we blow out 76 candles to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I am thinking that in a nation where 79 percent of the people believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, there is no good reason not to imagine the possibility of a revived and renewed Christian left.

My thoughts today are drawn to fresh reflections on the New Year's day activism of Chicago trainees for Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), who challenged a toy store on the question of marketing violent video games. The activists are training to go to places like Hebron, Colombia, Iraq, and Grassy Narrows, Ontario, where epidemics of violence rip through bodies and forests alike.

But the CPT action is less than half of what's on my mind this morning. I'm more concerned about what happens in a country that is 80 percent Christian when left activists refuse to pay attention to the Christian left, simply because it is Christian. In terms of hardball shrewdness, if nothing else, a leftist rejection of the Christian left in America is a certified guarantee of defeat.

As King once warned bourgeois America that we must not be afraid to say that Du Bois was a Communist, so we might warn the American left: we must not be afraid to remember that King was a Christian.

Paco Michelson, a CPT trainee from Huntington, Indiana, tells me by telephone that he has played "all the games" that he was protesting against on New Year's Day. He was the one who pretended to play video games upon a coffin, as activists read the names of Americans and Iraqis killed in war.

"I still think the games are fun," says Michelson. But as a matter of social conscience, he also thinks it would be better if these killing games, rated M for Mature and singled out for violent content, were not sold as toys.

Michelson understands how the image of Christian inspectors is bound to make folks wary. What CPT did in Chicago, taking things off shelves, looks a lot like censorship. But on this birthday of King, our great national icon of nonviolence, we have to demand an answer to the question: so what are we doing about our cultural addictions to violence? especially as the consequences of that sickness are so clearly played out in the body counts of Iraq?

"It's a conflicting issue for Americans, our addiction to violence," says Michelson. "I don't think it's a very popular thing to think about." He wrote the CPT press release that claimed a "direct connection between ongoing violence in the Middle East and the impact of violent toys on children."

Amy Knickrehm served as emcee for the street theater, orchestrating readers who called off the names of people killed: three Iraqis for every American. Knickrehm explains that the ratio of Iraqi to American casualties of war is actually closer to a hundred to one, but the group wanted to cover the names of Illinois natives killed, and if they had read 100 Iraqi names each time, it would have been a very long day.

Although Knickrehm has many friends who play the video games, and although she sees no effects that the games have on her friends, she thinks that keeping the more violent games away from kids is something that her friends would support.

Seven years ago, Knickrehm joined one of the peace churches, the Church of the Brethren, partly because she kept seeing the red baseball caps on the heads of Brethren activists at Chicago street actions. For peace churches such as The Brethren, Anabaptists, Mennonites, or Quakers, a commitment to pacifism goes back to the time of Menno Simons (1536-1561) for whom the Mennonites are named. But that is another story.

What's crucial for today, King's birthday, is a reminder to the American left that there are some Christians who have been persistently organized against war for more than 400 years, and they have often been as isolated as they were two weeks ago when they asked a toy store to stop selling war games to children.

When the living King talks about nonviolence, he has a radical and comprehensive vision about a global way of life. For King, the education of our children is seamlessly connected to the violence of our war zones. Toy stores are socially and morally intertwined with Falluja and Hebron. And King often expresses that vision in the language of his Christian faith.

Today, on his birthday, as we survey the eighty percent of Americans who subscribe to Christian concepts, the left cannot afford to ignore those who have never just paid lip service to King.

Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. His chapter on civil rights under Clinton and Bush appears in Dime's Worth of Difference, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net

who would Jesus bomb?

This is being forwarded around by email and is in the blogosphere:

Dr. Robin Meyers
Oklahoma University Peace Rally
November 14, 2004

As some of you know, I am minister of Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, an Open and Affirming, Peace and Justice church in northwest Oklahoma City, and professor of Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University.

But you would most likely have encountered me on the pages of the Oklahoma Gazette, where I have been a columnist for six years, and hold the record for the most number of angry letters to the editor.

Tonight, I join ranks of those who are angry, because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus, but whose actions are anything but Christian.

We've heard a lot lately about so-called "moral values" as having swung the election to President Bush. Well, I'm a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a moral value -- I mean what are we talking about?

Because we don't get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does. Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their side:

-- When you start a war on false pretenses, and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God's will, and that your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us who have given our lives to teaching and preaching the faith who believe that this is not only not moral, but immoral.

-- When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on their head (you know, Sermon on the Mount stuff like that we must never return violence for violence and that those who live by the sword will die by the sword), you are doing something immoral.

-- When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam, and then question the patriotism of someone who volunteered to fight, and came home a hero, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the gospel, which says that the way the strong treat the weak is the ultimate ethical test, by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us so the strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you wink at the torture of prisoners, and deprive so-called "enemy combatants" of the rules of the Geneva convention, which your own country helped to establish and insists that other countries follow, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you claim that the world can be divided up into the good guys and the evil doers, slice up your own nation into those who are with you, or with the terrorists -- and then launch a war which enriches your own friends and seizes control of the oil to which we are addicted, instead of helping us to kick the habit, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you fail to veto a single spending bill, but ask us to pay for a war with no exit strategy and no end in sight, creating an enormous deficit that hangs like a great millstone around the necks of our children, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you cause most of the rest of the world to hate a country that was once the most loved country in the world, and act like it doesn't matter what others think of us, only what God thinks of you, you have done something immoral.

-- When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out record numbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you favor the death penalty, and yet claim to be a follower of Jesus, who said an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way of the kingdom, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect the earth which is God's gift to us all, so that the corporations that bought you and paid for your favors will make higher profits while our children breathe dirty air and live in a toxic world, you have done something immoral. The earth belongs to the Lord, not Halliburton.

-- When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.

-- When you tell people that you intend to run and govern as a "compassionate conservative," using the word which is the essence of all religious faith-compassion, and then show no compassion for anyone who disagrees with you, and no patience with those who cry to you for help, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you talk about Jesus constantly, who was a healer of the sick, but do nothing to make sure that anyone who is sick can go to see a doctor, even if she doesn't have a penny in her pocket, you are doing something immoral.

-- When you put judges on the bench who are racist, and will set women back a hundred years, and when you surround yourself with preachers who say gays ought to be killed, you are doing something immoral.

I'm tired of people thinking that because I'm a Christian, I must be a supporter of President Bush, or that because I favor civil rights and gay rights I must not be a person of faith. I'm tired of people saying that I can't support the troops but oppose the war.

-- I heard that when I was your age, when the Vietnam war was raging. We knew that that war was wrong, and you know that this war is wrong--the only question is how many people are going to die before these make-believe Christians are removed from power?

This country is bankrupt. The war is morally bankrupt. The claim of this administration to be Christian is bankrupt. And the only people who can turn things around are people like you--young people who are just beginning to wake up to what is happening to them. It's your country to take back. It's your faith to take back. It's your future to take back.

Don't be afraid to speak out. Don't back down when your friends begin to tell you that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be wrapped around the cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut. Real Christians take chances for peace. So do real Jews, and real Muslims, and real Hindus, and real Buddhists--so do all the faith traditions of the world at their heart believe one thing: life is precious. Every human being is precious. Arrogance is the opposite of faith. Greed is the opposite of charity. And believing that one has never made a mistake is the mark of a deluded man, not a man of faith.

And war -- war is the greatest failure of the human race -- and thus the greatest failure of faith.

There's an old rock and roll song, whose lyrics say it all: War, what is it good for? absolutely nothing.

And what is the dream of the prophets? That we should study war no more, that we should beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Who would Jesus bomb, indeed? How many wars does it take to know that too many people have died? What if they gave a war and nobody came? Maybe one day we will find out.

The Tent of Abraham, Hagar, & Sarah: A Call for Peacemaking

We are members of the families of Abraham — Muslims, Christians, Jews.

Our traditions teach us to have compassion, seek justice, and pursue peace for all peoples. We bear especially deep concern for the region where Abraham grew and learned, taught and flourished. Today that region stretches from Iraq, where Abraham grew up, to Israel and Palestine, where he sojourned, and to Mecca and Egypt, where he visited.

Today our hearts are broken by the violence poured out upon the peoples of that broad region.

That violence has included terrorist attacks on and kidnappings of Americans, Israelis, Iraqis, Europeans, and others by various Palestinian and Iraqi groups and by Al Qaeda; the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel and of Iraq by the United States; and the torture of prisoners by several different police forces, military forces, and governments in the region.

From our heartbreak at these destructive actions, we intend to open our hearts more fully to each other and to the suffering of all peoples.

In the name of the One God Whom we all serve and celebrate, we condemn all these forms of violence. To end the present wars and to take serious steps toward the peace that all our traditions demand of us, we call on governments and on the leaders of all religious and cultural communities to act.

We urge the US government to set a firm and speedy date for completing the safe return home from Iraq of all American soldiers and civilians under military contract. We urge the UN to work directly with Iraqi political groupings to transfer power in Iraq to an elected government.

We urge the UN, the US, the European Union, and Russia to convene a comprehensive peace conference through which the governments of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Iran, and all Arab states conclude a full diplomatic, economic, and cultural peace with Israel and Palestine, defined approximately on the 1967 boundaries, with small mutual adjustments.

We urge the international community to work out lawful and effective means to deal with the dangers of international terrorism, the spread of nuclear and similar weapons, and conflicts over the control of oil and water.

We ourselves will act to create transnational and interfaith networks of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who will covenant together -

_ to insist that governments take these steps,

_ to undertake whatever nonviolent actions are necessary to prevent more violence and achieve a just peace throughout the region,

_ and to grow grass-roots relationships that bind together those who have been enemies into a Compassionate Coalition.

According to tradition, Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah kept their tent open in all four directions, the more easily to share their food and water with travelers from anywhere. In that spirit, we welcome all those who thirst and hunger for justice, peace, and dignity, to join in affirming this statement.

- Sister Joan Chittister, OSB; Rev. Bob Edgar, National Council of Churches; Dr. Sayyid Muhammad Syeed, Islamic Society of North America; Imam Abdul Faisal Rauf, Imam Talib Abdur Rashid, Imam Mahdi Bray, Saadi Shakur/Neil Douglas-Klotz; Rabbis Elliot Dorff, Gerry Serotta, David Teutsch, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Arthur Waskow, and Sheila Weinberg; --- and YOU?

. . . .text of an advertisement published in the New York Times, 14 January 2005, by The Shalom Center.

Biblical support for conscientious objection

Conscientious objection rests on the bedrock of the Judeo-Christian heritage, argues Laura Duhan Kaplan in a Tikkun article, Rabbinic Concepts and Contemporary Conscientious Objection:

The building blocks of the discussion on conscientious objection are found in Deuteronomy 20, which presents rules for the ethical conduct of war, including draft exemptions, peace negotiations, treatment of noncombatants, and environmental preservation. The narrative that frames the Book of Deuteronomy recounts Moses the Lawgiver instructing the assembled Israelites on the laws of warfare shortly before their invading army enters the land of Canaan, an invasion dated approximately 1200 bce by archeologists. Some critical Biblical scholars date Deuteronomy to the seventh century bce during the reign of King Josiah of Judah. They read II Kings 22-23 as suggesting that King Josiah hired a scribe to describe his program of religious reform as if it were the original law of Moses, and then staged an important archeological "discovery" of a pseudo-ancient scroll. Whether we read Deuteronomy as Moses' words or as Josiah's, it is likely that these laws are not meant to be theoretical or metaphorical, but are to govern the actual conduct of national military campaigns.

Deuteronomy 20:5-8 focuses on exemptions from military service. Discussions by traditionally oriented Jewish scholars attempt first to determine which principles guide the exemptions and then when the exemptions apply.

Kaplan's article is worth reading in full, a welcome correctio to the notion promulgated by some fundamentalist Christians that God backs the US war in Iraq, although Kaplan's article more directly addresses Israel's refuseniks.

the compassion center

We have a story today about helping the homeless -- not in South Asia, but here at home. It's about a church in Bloomington, Illinois that decided to build a center for the homeless before it built a new sanctuary for itself. An energetic pastor led the way, which required an unusual church, union, business, and government coalition.

....read it all: The Compassion Center, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly

intelligent design

Bruce Prescott, making sense over at Mainstream Baptist:

I happen to believe that an 'Intelligence' (God) created the universe and that it is 'well designed' (good). That, however, is a conclusion drawn by faith. It has nothing to do with the political wedge issue concocted by right-wing Christians in an attempt to force public schools to teach their brand of religion as science.

Progressive Christian Bloggers Network:

Welcome folks to the Progressive Christian Blogger Network - a home for a more progressive Christianity rooted in biblical faith. We are a very loose network of like-minded bloggers who share a common Christian ethos and a common blog-roll.

This is a very open and loose network - no theological creeds or doctrinal statements, no dues or obligation, representing a diversity of traditions of historic Christianity. But if you identify with a more progressive Christianity, rooted in a politics of Jesus and of the cross, or if you increasingly find your self, as a Christian, to be a "resident alien" living in country that thinks its God's gift to the world, you probably know who you are, you probably blog about these things, and perhaps some good could come from networking together.

to build a progressive religious base

David Dyson has been doing God's work for decades. Pastor of the landmark Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Dyson worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, toiled as an organizer in the labor movement for years, and later co-founded the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in Central America, a group of 20 national unions working for peace and trade union rights in war-torn Central America.

Dyson argues that if we are going to build a progressive religious base, we need to organize at the congregational (grassroots) level instead of adopting a top-heavy, celebrity clergy model. He knows, as he told me, that "this is hard old-fashioned work...But if the work continues the way it is going, we will once again cede the field to the right...Sorry to be so ornery about this but as a pastor, and a former organizer, I feel rather passionate" about the changes progressives need to make.

...read it all: Rev. Dyson's Organizing Wisdom, The Nation, 7 January 2005; includes link to recent speech by Rev. Dyson.

where was God?

That's the question asked in Al's Morning Meeting this morning, with links to a spectrum of online articles that seek answers.

"we are all torturers now"

Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Americans began torturing prisoners, and they have never really stopped. However much these words have about them the ring of accusation, they must by now be accepted as fact. From Red Cross reports, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's inquiry, James R. Schlesinger's Pentagon-sanctioned commission and other government and independent investigations, we have in our possession hundreds of accounts of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment - to use a phrase of the Red Cross - "tantamount to torture."

....what we are unlikely to hear, given the balance of votes in the Senate, are many voices making the obvious argument that with this record, Mr. Gonzales is unfit to serve as attorney general. So let me make it: Mr. Gonzales is unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that he personally helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because, while the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client to concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit, finally, because he has rightly become the symbol of the United States' fateful departure from a body of settled international law and human rights practice for which the country claims to stand.

....read it all: We Are All Torturers Now by Mark Danner in today's New York Times

You know how bad the situation is when the president's choice for attorney general has to formally pledge not to support torture anymore.

....read it all: Don't Torture Yourself (That's His Job) by Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times

Watching the Gonzales confirmation hearings this morning, it seems clear the man still believes that torture is the American way, when the President wants it that way.

WWJD?

Bruce Prescott, Mainstream Baptist:

Mark my words -- the day this administration re-institutes a compulsory draft that could force my children to serve in its unjust, pre-emptive war in Iraq, will be the day that I begin devoting every free, waking moment to some form of peaceful, civil disobedience.

why does religon news coverage leave so much to be desired?

Not enough experienced religion reporters. That's the simple answer from Julia Duin in her article, Help Wanted on the Religion Beat, today at Poynter Online.

an open letter to Alberto R. Gonzales

January 4, 2005

Hon. Alberto R. Gonzales
Counsel to the President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Judge Gonzales:

We, the undersigned religious leaders, greet your nomination to be Attorney General of the United States with grave concern.

As a self-professed evangelical Christian, you surely know that all people are created in the image of God. You see it as a moral imperative to treat each human being with reverence and dignity. We invite you to affirm with us that we are all are made in the image of God – every human being. We invite you to acknowledge that no legal category created by mere mortals can revoke that status. You understand that torture – the deliberate effort to undermine human dignity – is a grave sin and affront to God. You would not deny that the systemic use of torture on prisoners at Abu Ghraib was fundamentally immoral, as is the deliberate rendering of any detainee to authorities likely to commit torture.

We urge you to declare that any attempt to undermine international standards on torture, renditions, or habeas corpus is not only wrong but sinful. We are concerned that as White House counsel you have shown a troubling disregard for international laws against torture, for the legal rights of suspected "enemy combatants," and for the adverse consequences your decisions have had at home and abroad.

How could you have written a series of legal memos that disrespected international law and invited these abuses? How could you have justified the use of torture and disavowed protections for prisoners of war? How could you have referred to the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and “obsolete.” We fear that your legal judgments have paved the way to torture and abuse.

We therefore call upon you

• To denounce the use of torture under any circumstances;

• To affirm, with the Supreme Court, that it is unconstitutional to imprison anyone designated as an "enemy combatant" for months without access to lawyers or the right to challenge their detentions in court;

• To affirm the binding legality of the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war;

• And to reject the practice of "extraordinary rendition," at home and abroad, by which terrorist suspects are sent to countries that practice torture for interrogation.

We believe, as you do, that the United States must be an example of moral leadership in the world community. However, the events at Abu Ghraib have gravely compromised America's moral authority. We ask that you commit yourself as Attorney General to repairing that damage by articulating and enforcing legal policies that reject the use of torture, embrace and advance standards of international law, and honor the dignity of all of God's creation.

With prayers for wisdom and grace,

Over 225 Religious Leaders

(Affiliations listed for identification only)

Initial Endorsers:

Rev. Dr. George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary
Coordinator: Church Folks for a Better America
Dr. C. René Padilla, General Secretary for Latin America, IFES
Sr. Dianna Ortiz, director, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center
Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB
Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite, President, Chicago Theological Seminary
Mr. Jim Wallis, Editor, Sojourners
Dr. Ron Sider, President, Evangelicals for Social Action
Dr. Anthony Campolo, Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education
Dr. Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, St. Louis University
Dr. Juanita Jartu Jolly, Agape Christian Tabernacle
Rev. Victor Aloyo, Jr., Director of Vocations, Princeton Theological Seminary
Rev. Alexia Salvatierra, Executive Director, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice
Pastor Amaury Tañón-Santos, American Baptist Churches
The Rev. John E. Denaro, Episcopal Migration Ministries
Rabbi Michael Lerner, The TIKKUN Community
Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, The Divinity School of Duke University
Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, Aux. Bishop, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit
Bishop James H. Burch, Catholic Diocese of One Spirit
Rev. Dr. Joseph C. Hough, Jr., President, Union Theological Seminary
Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, The Shefa Fund
Rev. Dr. James H. Cone, Union Theological Seminary
Dr Teresa Whitehurst, Jesus on the Family Institute
Dr. Glen Stassen, Fuller Theological Seminary
Rabbi Brian Walt, Rabbis for Human Rights North America
Rev. Romal Tune, African American Ministers Council
Rev. Dr. Therese M. Becker, Department of Spiritual Care, University of Chicago Hospitals
Rabbi Shirley Idelson, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
Rev. Theophlus Caviness, Greater Abyssinia, Cleveland, OH
Rev. Violete Dease, Abyssinian Baptist, Harlem, NY
Dr. Paul H. Sherry, National Council of Churches of Christ

...from: Church Folks for a Better America (link to more info, opportunity to donate, more signers, etc.)




(image: Freeway Blogger)

scholars say religion & science need each other

Despite the perceived truths science may provide, scientists must work with theologians to address the essential questions about the universe, said George Ellis at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting....The loss of religious faith and decline in attendance at churches and synagogues is due to the widespread belief that science expresses truth while religion does not, said Ellis....“There is no scientific experiment to tell us what is good and what is evil,” he said.

Science cannot provide values, “but the great world religions have a common core of ethical values that can be used to provide guidance on practical issues in science,” Ellis explained. “Science is powerful in its domain, but that domain is strictly limited.”

Religious scholars play a crucial role in the quest to account for truth because they help balance scientific fundamentalism with more humanist views, said Ellis, and can help provide answers about aesthetics, metaphysics and the meaning of life.

....read it all: Don’t ask whether, ask why: Religion and science must work together to answer life’s bigger questions, by Thomas Jay Oord, Science & Theology News

no "Christian nation"

This year, I resolve to stop remaining silent whenever I hear Christians talk about our country being a "Christian Nation." Nations can't be Christian. Genuine faith requires an individual, voluntary, personal commitment.
-Dr. Bruce Prescott, Mainstream Baptist

wanted: tidal wave of human love

We know that our individual efforts to send money, sacred and important though they are, cannot come close to reaching the level of the tens of billions of dollars that will be needed to help the millions of people who have lost homes, work, and everything the own or with which they could make a living. Only a full-scale governmental effort on the part of all the countries of the world, and most particularly the wealthy countries, could make much of an impact at this level of financial need. So it is particularly distressing to find once again that those of us who live in the U.S. have to witness our own country giving a pathetically small amount of money (at the moment I’m writing this, more money is going to be spent for the celebration of President Bush’s second inaugural than is being sent to SouthEast Asia to repair and rebuild). The hundreds of billions of dollars being sunk into a war against Sunnis in Iraq is monies that could have been spent on providing the kind of advanced warning systems, and solid construction of buildings, that might have dramatically limited the damage and deaths caused by this terrible storm. Once again, the unequal distribution of wealth on the planet plays out dramatically in the poorest and most defenseless being those most hurt.

So when I was asked last night, during a guest appearance on an ABC radio call-in show, “Where was God During the Tsunami?”, my first response was to say, as I’ve said about God during the Holocaust, “Isn’t this an attempt to avoid the more pressing question of “Where was humanity? Why have we been so unwilling to take serious responsibility for the well-being of others on the planet?”

....Two weeks ago the United Nations issued a report detailing the deaths of more than 29,000 children every single day as a result of avoidable diseases and malnutrition. Over ten million children a year!! The difference between the almost non-existent coverage of this on-going human-created disaster and the huge focus on the terrible tsunami-generated suffering in South East Asia reveals some deep and ugly truths about our collective self-deceptions. Imagine if every single day there were headlines in every newspaper in the world and every television show saying: "29,000 children died yesterday from preventable diseases and malnutrition" and then the rest of the stories alternated between detailed personal accounts of families where this devastation was taking place, and side bar features detailing what was happening in advanced industrial countries, like this: "all this suffering was happening while the wealthiest people in the world enjoyed excesses of food, worried about how to lose weight because they eat too much, spent monies trying to convince farmers not to grow too much food for fear that doing so would drive down prices, and were cutting the taxes of their wealthiest rather than seeking to redistribute their excess millions of dollars of personal income." If the story were told that way every day, the goodness of human beings would rebel quickly against these social systems that made all this suffering possible, suffering far far far far far in excess of all the suffering caused by tsunamis and other natural disasters.

....One reason that social change seems so unrealistic is because not only these news people but almost everyone else has been taught that others are only motivated by narrow material self-interest. Yet when we watch the response of the people of the world to this tragedy we see just the opposite—a huge outpouring of generosity. Millions of people are making contributions, and billions are showing signs of caring. And it is this way whenever we face a situation in which the official media lets down its normal “cynical realism” and tells us that it’s o.k. to show our caring side.

Those who despair are mistaken--the goodness of humanity is always just a few inches from the surface, on the verge of being released. One reason why Right-wing Christian churches have been so successful is that they give people a spiritual context within which to let out their caring sides without worrying that they will face cynical put-downs from others around them. One task for progressives interested in social change is to find the best way to facilitate that process in a progressive context, but that will require a new sensitivity to a spiritual framework that validates and supports that spirit of generosity within most people.

Yet in the rest of our lives, few of us are ever encouraged to show caring beyond our small circles of friends and families, and if we are urged to show caring, it is only for the victims of some kind of natural disaster, but not for the kinds of problems we could actually deal with through collective restructuring of the world's economic and political arrangements--because that would threaten the interests of the powerful. They are all too glad to divert our attention to the disasters that can't be changed, and to channeling our anger into anger at God instead of anger at our social system.

....read it all: Where Was God in The Tsunami? And where has humanity been? by Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun, 31 December 2004

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