compassionate christian

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip

2008-08-20T11:52:00.001-07:00

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip
Originally uploaded by http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip

2008-08-19T11:47:00.001-07:00

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip
Originally uploaded by http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip

2008-08-19T11:42:00.001-07:00

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip
Originally uploaded by http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

flyer by http://TheConcreteJungle.Book.com

2008-08-18T10:00:00.001-07:00

flyer by http://TheConcreteJungle.Book.com
Originally uploaded by http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

the concrete jungle book flyer

2008-08-15T14:38:00.001-07:00

the concrete jungle book flyer
Originally uploaded by http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

the concrete jungle book flyer

2008-08-12T18:33:00.001-07:00

the concrete jungle book flyer
Originally uploaded by http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip

2008-08-11T06:27:00.001-07:00

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip
Originally uploaded by http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

from a new prose+comics scrapbook novel, TheConcreteJungleBook

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip

2008-08-11T06:25:00.001-07:00

The Concrete Jungle Book stencil by Srayla Tip
Originally uploaded by http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com

from a new prose+comics scrapbook novel, TheConcreteJungleBook

love one another, please

2005-05-31T10:47:00.000-07:00

Sign the Jacksonville Declaration

Help make justice and compassion the hallmarks of our country. Add your signature to this letter. Let the Political and Church Leaders of the Religious Right know they do not speak for you. Help them hear a different understanding of Christian values. Add your voice below.

To The Political and Church Leaders of the Religious Right:

As responsible and patriotic Americans, we can be silent no longer. In light of the deepening polarization in our country's social and political life, we feel compelled to speak out to you in a spirit of sincerity.

For many people, your words and actions have identified Christianity with radical, far right politics. We believe that your use of Christianity has sown the seeds of deep discord in our nation and throughout the world. Hear some of your own words:

"You owe liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ."
-- Church Leader Bob Jones, to George W. Bush after 2004 election

"I hope the Supreme Court will finally read the Constitution and see there's no such thing, or no mention, of separation of church and state in the Constitution."
-- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas)

"Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence…in short, over every aspect and institution of human society."
-- Dr. D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Ministries

"…the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated…"
-- Tony Perkins, Family Research Council

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians … the ACLU, People For the American Way … I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'."
-- Rev. Jerry Falwell, on Pat Robertson's 700 Club discussing the WTC attacks

We must tell you now that you do not speak for us, or for our politics. We say "No" to the ways you are using the name and language of Christianity to advance what we see as extremist political goals. We do not support your agenda to erode the separation of church and state, to blur the vital distinction between your interpretation of Christianity and our shared democratic institutions. Moreover, we do not accept what seems to be your understanding of Christian values. We reject a Christianity co-opted by any government and used as a tool to ostracize, to subjugate, or to condone bigotry, greed and injustice.

If your politics flow from your faith, then we do not know the Jesus you claim to follow. We cannot imagine a Jesus who would say:

"You are strong and powerful; your ideals are noble. Make war to spread those ideals."
"The end is near - So it doesn't matter what you do to my Father's creation."
"Heal the sick - Provided they can pay."
"All are welcome at the table - As long as they are the same as we are."
"Follow me - And help me form a government to force others to follow."

Do you believe such statements truly reflect Christian or American values? Do these views follow what Jesus taught? Do you think it is genuinely American to steer our country toward a Christian theocracy? Is it Christian to foster intolerance? Is this the path to which Jesus leads us?

We say "No". Instead, we say "Yes" to values Jesus plainly and passionately practiced. Listen to his words:

"I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
-- John 13:34-35

We hold up to all fellow Americans the heart of Jesus' teaching: his unwavering commitment to justice, compassion, responsibility, equality, and care "for the least of these". These are values Jesus taught, and they also serve among America's finest traditional values. Our political views flow from these values.

We also reaffirm a well-established American commitment to a clear separation of church and state. In your statements you often characterize America as a "Christian nation". We strongly disagree. As a nation of immigrants, America has been a land of freedom and diversity. Separation of church and state helps ensure liberty and justice for all Americans - not just those who are like-minded. Hear these words:

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Know that you do not speak for us. We oppose so many of your words and deeds. But though we may disagree with you, we offer this declaration in a spirit of openness. We hope you will respond in kind. We call on you to stop dividing our country with your words and actions, and we invite you to turn to compassion and justice, values that Jesus lived.

In Truth and Faith,
Christian Alliance for Progress

Sacred Heart Mural

2005-05-31T07:24:00.000-07:00

Sacred Heart Mural
Originally uploaded by byrdiegyrl.

2005-05-30T21:57:00.000-07:00

something for everyone
Originally uploaded by deepwarren.

handwriting on the wall

2005-05-19T10:28:00.000-07:00

Jesus
Originally uploaded by kianee.

God is love

2005-05-13T20:05:00.000-07:00

DSC00150
Originally uploaded by ingerson.

environmentalist evangelicals

2005-03-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

EEN urges conservative Christians to embrace the Earth: Environmental movement finds way for evangelicals to tap into their green sides by Deborah Pardo-Kaplan, Science & Theology News, March 2005, excerpts:

Environmentalists and anti-abortion activists rarely rally together at the same event. But at a Washington, D.C., gathering this January, the two groups walked side by side.

Some participants at the 32nd annual March for Life held signs saying, “I regret my abortion,” while other anitabortion marchers swayed banners proclaiming, “Stop mercury poisoning of the unborn.” Many of the 100,000 marchers were evangelical Christians; that number included a small group of environmentalists. The National Association of Evangelicals, which has a membership of 45,000 churches and 52 denominations, led the mercury-awareness campaigners.

The Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, first brought the mercury issue to the attention of evangelical Christians at a June conference on the environment in Sandy Cove, Md. Ball suggested that evangelical Christians could enter the environmental discussion through aiding the unborn — who may be absorbing low but harmful levels of toxicity by the mother’s consumption of fish, reported an NAE newsletter.

The meeting of 40 evangelical leaders at Sandy Cove reflected a growing trend of evangelical Christian interest in environmental stewardship. Among those attending were editors of Christianity Today, executives of World Vision, professors of Christian seminaries and heads of churches. By the end of the conference, 29 leaders had signed a covenant promising to follow up with a statement on climate change by the summer of 2005.

....Christians have been realizing that as a result of global warming, many in poor countries will suffer with the rise from flooding, droughts and risks to public health. Some are concerned about predictions that 300 million cases of malaria could develop from global warming, Ball said.

....Evangelicals have been concerned about the environment since the late 1960s, Ball said. “But what we are now experiencing is a growing interest within the center of the evangelical community,” he continued, “and a growing activism by such groups as the National Association of Evangelicals.” In the past, evangelical Christians have hesitated or largely ignored environmental issues, considering them to be the property of New Agers and left-wing liberals, and second in priority to salvation concerns. They have also questioned the science behind global warming.

....The environmental discussion among evangelicals is heading forward. The National Association of Evangelicals recently adopted a statement on civic engagement called “The Health of the Nation,” listing “care for creation” as one of its principles. It was the first time the association had articulated its political and social agenda, said Cizik.

The Evangelical Environmental Network, with its 23 partner organizations, has launched campaigns since its founding 10 years ago. Five hundred evangelical leaders endorsed the network’s initial guiding statement of faith on the care of creation. Among its programs over the years, the network has helped renew the Endangered Species Act, create environmental awareness for families and spark a large media blitz, with its “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign.

....Despite the campaigns, some say many Christians still have reservations to take part in environmental issues. Tony Campolo blames the impact of the Left Behind series, written by the Rev. Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. These books, he said, reflect a theology of the end of days that evangelicals may interpret as a lessening of Christian care for the Earth and a heightening of the relevance of eternity.

Those leading the evangelical groups for creation stewardship see that kind of theology as a distortion of biblical truth. They say that following Jesus means also caring for the physical world that he created. They hope to pass on their ideology and biblical interpretation to many evangelicals.

“It will be as a result of their seeing this as God’s call,” said Calvin DeWitt, president of Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies, “or their seeing this as a vital part of their responsibility, or a vital part of their dedication to the sanctity of life, or to the vibrancy of life, or their belief that might emerge here — that the creation story has as its core stewardship.”

see all of creation as God’s very large and continuous knitting project

2005-02-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

The very world we inhabit, and that inhabits us, in this very moment is the ongoing creation of God. I am impressed by the psalmist’s imagery of our being knitted by God in our mother’s wombs. It only makes sense to extend the imagery beyond the womb and to see all of creation as God’s very large and continuous knitting project!

... Michael Lodahl, theology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, in Advocating the one in the theological many, Science & Theology News

"budgets are moral documents"

2005-02-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

Sojourners:

On February 7, President Bush released his proposed 2006 federal budget. In addition to projecting record deficits and increases in military spending, the budget proposes major cuts to domestic programs that benefit people living in poverty.

This budget reflects a set of priorities that stand in clear opposition to biblical values. Spending more money on nuclear warheads and tax cuts that benefit the rich is not a strategy that would be affirmed by the biblical prophets-and the proposed cuts to low-income programs will not even realize the president's stated goal of reducing the deficit.

Please urge your members of Congress to consider the effect this budget will have on our nation's poor before taking a vote.

parenting in Jesus' footsteps

2005-02-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

To raise a child, one needs three invaluable allies: the Bible, the help of an extended family and "biblical-based resources" -- 9-inch-long spanking paddles of blue polyurethane, according to Steve Haymond from Bakersfield, who sells the paddles online for $6.50 apiece.

Twyla Bullock, in Eufaula, Okla., swears by the Rod -- a 22-inch, $5 white nylon whipping stick her husband designed and produced until recently. Named after the biblical "rod of correction," the Rod provides "a faith-based way to discipline children ... and train them as Christians," Bullock explains.

Susan Lawrence, a devout Lutheran from Arlington, Mass., is appalled.

"Christians are supposed to listen to Jesus," Lawrence said, bringing the Rod down with a thump on the seat of her living room futon and looking at the resulting dent with incredulity. "Can you imagine Jesus teaching to use the Rod?"

Corporal punishment has long been an accepted method of child discipline among evangelical and fundamentalist groups, but an increasing number of Christians are raising objections, arguing that advocates of spanking wrongly cite Scripture to justify a practice that should be banned. Lawrence, who peppers her conversation with quotes from the New Testament, says striking children defies the Golden Rule from the Gospel of Matthew: "In everything do to others as you would have them do to you."

Last year, Lawrence, 49, launched her Parenting in Jesus' Footsteps site on the Web (www.parentinginjesusfootsteps.org,), which is critical of corporal punishment being practiced by Christian parents.

...read it all: Christian crusaders go to battle over spanking: Tools of discipline horrify some of faithful by Anna Badkhen, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 February 2005

SpongeBob welcome at UCC

2005-01-24T17:08:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-23T11:15:00.000-08:00

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"

2005-01-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-01-16T21:45:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-01-15T10:40:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-14T09:35:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-12T10:07:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-01-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-08T13:08:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-01-07T11:01:00.000-08:00

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"

2005-01-06T17:17:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-01-06T17:09:00.000-08:00

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?

2005-01-06T11:02:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-03T08:35:00.000-08:00

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"

2005-01-03T08:19:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

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

[image: a perfect world]

Jesus & Alinsky

2004-12-16T14:59:00.000-08:00

Jesus' Third Way

Seize the moral initiative.

Find a creative alternative to violence.

Assert your own humanity and dignity as a person.

Meet force with ridicule or humor.

Break the cycle of humiliation.

Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position.

Expose the injustice of the system.

Take control of the power dynamic.

Shame the oppressor into repentance.

Stand your ground.

Force the Powers into decisions for which they are not prepared.

Recognize your own power.

Be willing to suffer rather than retaliate.

Force the oppressor to see you in a new light.

Deprive the oppressor of a situation where force is effective.

Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws.

It is too bad Jesus did not provide fifteen or twenty more examples since we do not tend toward this new response naturally. Some examples from political history might help engrave it more deeply in our minds:

In Alagamar, Brazil, a group of peasants organized a long-term struggle to preserve their lands against attempts at illegal expropriation by national and international firms (with the connivance of local politicians and the military). Some of the peasants were arrested and jailed in town. Their companions decided they were all equally responsible. Hundreds marched to town. They filled the house of the judge, demanding to be jailed with those who had been arrested. The judge was finally obliged to send them all home, including the prisoners.

During the Vietnam War, one woman claimed seventy-nine dependents on her United States income tax, all Vietnamese orphans, so she owed no tax. They were not legal dependents, of course, so were disallowed. No, she insisted, these children have been orphaned by indiscriminate United States bombing; we are responsible for their lives. She forced the Internal Revenue Service to take her to court. That gave her a larger forum for making her case. She used the system against itself to unmask the moral indefensibility of what the system was doing. Of course she "lost" the case, but she made her point.

During World War II, when Nazi authorities in occupied Denmark promulgated an order that all Jews had to wear yellow armbands with the Star of David, the king made it a point to attend a celebration in the Copenhagen synagogue. He and most of the population of Copenhagen donned yellow armbands as well. His stand was affirmed by the Bishop of Sjaelland and other Lutheran clergy. The Nazis eventually had to rescind the order.

It is important to repeat such stories to extend our imaginations for creative nonviolence. Since it is not a natural response, we need to be schooled in it. We need models, and we need to rehearse nonviolence in our daily lives if we ever hope to resort to it in crises.

Maybe it would help to juxtapose Jesus' teachings with legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky's principles for nonviolent community action (in his Rules for Radicals) to gain a clearer sense of their practicality and pertinence to the struggles of our time. Among rules Alinsky developed in his attempts to organize American workers and minority communities are these:

(1) Power is not only what you have but what your enemy thinks you have.

(2) Never go outside the experience of your people.

(3) Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

Jesus, like Alinsky, recommended using your experience of being belittled, insulted, or dispossessed in such a way as to seize the initiative from the oppressor, who finds reactions like going the second mile, stripping naked, or turning the other cheek totally outside his experience. This forces him her to take your power seriously and perhaps even to recognize your humanity.

Alinsky offers other suggestions. Again we see the parallels:

(4) Make your enemies live up to their own book of rules.

(5) Ridicule is your most potent weapon.

(6) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

(7) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

The debtor in Jesus' example turned the law against his creditor by obeying it, following the letter of the law, but throwing in his underwear as well. The creditor's greed is exposed by his own ruthlessness, and this happens quickly and in a way that could only regale the debtor's sympathizers, just as Alinsky suggests. This puts all other such creditors on notice and arms all other debtors with a new sense of possibilities. Alinsky's list continues:

(8) Keep the pressure on.

(9) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

(10) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.

Jesus, in his three brief examples, does not lay out the basis of a sustained movement, but his ministry as a whole is a model of long-term social struggle that maintains a constant pressure. Mark depicts Jesus' movements as a blitzkrieg. His teaching poses immediate and continuing threats to the authorities. The good he brings is misperceived as evil, his following is overestimated, his militancy is misread as sedition, and his proclamation of the coming Reign of God is mistaken as a manifesto for military revolution.

Disavowing violence, Jesus wades into the hostility of Jerusalem openhanded, setting simple truth against force. Terrified by the threat of this man and his following, the authorities resort to their ultimate deterrent, death, only to discover it impotent and themselves unmasked. The cross, hideous and macabre, becomes the symbol of liberation. The movement that should have died becomes a world religion.

Alinsky offers three last suggestions:

(11) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through to its counterside.

(12) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

(13) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Alinsky delighted in using the most vicious behavior of his opponents-burglaries of movement headquarters, attempted blackmail, and failed assassinations-to destroy their public credibility. Here were elected officials, respected corporations, and trusted police, engaging in patent illegalities to maintain privilege.

In the same way, Jesus suggests amplifying an injustice (turning the other cheek, removing your undergarment, going the second mile) to expose the fundamental wrongness of legalized oppression. The law is "compassionate" in requiring that the debtor's cloak be returned at sunset, yes; but Judaism in its most lucid moments knew that the whole system of usury and indebtedness was itself the root of injustice and should never have been condoned (Exodus 22:25). The restriction of enforced labor to carrying the soldier's pack a single mile was a great advance over unlimited impressment, but occupation troops had no right to be on Jewish soil in the first place.

Jesus was not content merely to empower the powerless, however. Here his teachings fundamentally transcend Alinsky's. Jesus did not advocate non-violence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy but as a just means of opposing the enemy in such a way as to hold open the possibility of the enemy's becoming just as well.

...read it all: Jesus & Alinsky by Walter Wink

Ten reasons why justice is essential to the gospel

2004-12-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

by Ross Langmead

Someone asked me recently why justice-seeking figured so strongly in my approach to mission. I think they meant “as distinct from evangelism.” We were talking about asylum seekers.

I said something about the integration of the word (evangelism) and deed (loving our neighbor). I quoted Matthew 25, saying that for me one of the best ways to love God is to defend the voiceless.

I left the conversation stunned that a Christian should wonder why I keep talking about justice. But then I realized that ever since the time of the prophets we’ve needed to spell out for each generation the call to justice.

So, here are my 10 top overlapping reasons for being passionate about a gospel where justice is close to the centee. I reckon I could double the list without trying.

1. The Bible’s full of it. If we were to take to a Bible with scissors and cut out the thousands of verses about justice and the poor, we’d have a mangled mess of holes. In the Bible, our relationship to God is always tied to our relationships to each other.

2. We’re all equal before God. From Genesis 1 to Galatians 3, the story is the same. Humans are made in God’s image and stand equally before God in our great variety. This biblical truth is one of the pillars of the human-rights movement. Staying with asylum seekers for the moment, to those who are “nobodies” because they are stateless and homeless, this is Good News.

3. It’s part of shalom. When Jeremiah urged the Israelites in exile to seek the welfare of the city they found themselves in, he was using the term “shalom.” The Hebrew vision of shalom in relationship with God includes peace, well-being and justice, and is the same peace that Jesus promises us (Jn 14:27). Christian mission is living for shalom.

4. God is a God of justice. In the Hebrew Bible, God is always acting in history to set relationships right, defend the poor, the weak and the oppressed. In fact, God is the very manifestation of justice and mercy.

5. It’s part of God’s Commonwealth. Jesus’ favorite topic was the Commonwealth of God (or the kingdom of God), the new, upside-down order in which human relationships are upturned by God’s radically inclusive values. The social reversals that happen in his parables are amazing. A kingdom-centered mission will always point at the socio-political implications of conversion.

6. It’s part of the Good News. Jesus’ manifesto in Luke 4 suggests that the Good News is especially for the poor, the blind and the captive. His life and teaching backs this up repeatedly. It seems that what is good news to the poor seems like bad news to the rich, unless they see it is really good news for all.

7. Righteousness flows into justice. A missionary to a Spanish-speaking country discovered to his amazement that the Bible is full of talk about justicia. The English word “justice” doesn’t occur in the King James Version of the New Testament; the Greek word for justice and righteousness is always translated as “righteousness.” I guess the translators knew they were being paid by a king! Better to talk about being righteous than seeking justice. But the two can’t be separated.

8. Evangelism flows into social action. Billy Graham was asked once why he preached only personal salvation and not peace and justice. He said that as people become converted, they would be peacemakers and justice-seekers. He was pressed further. How come he’d been converted, and wasn’t more upfront about these things, then? From that day, to his credit, Graham included more of the dimensions of the Good News in his preaching. Following Jesus, we’re called to make visible the Good News, and that means both putting it into words and showing by our lives what it means in terms of justice and love.

9. Justice is structural love. Justice is fairness embedded in the structures of society. Biblical justice goes further than strict justice, and is imbued with grace, mercy and forgiveness. It is structural love.

10. No peace without justice. The Good News is all about reconciliation, the setting right of all relationships. But there is no peace without justice, as is clear in international relations. In the cloth of the gospel, God’s justice and forgiveness are seamlessly interwoven. It’s a wonder, then, that churches are not far more prophetic.

True, we have spoken up often, but for many churches, the order of priority seems to be: inward-and-upward-looking worship, education and groups for members, some care for others, and then, just occasionally, a tentative foray into the world of policies, rights, war and government directions.

There’s so much happening in the world to arouse our passion for justice that we ought to be standing up and shouting. But it will only happen if our vision of the gospel contains justice at the heart.

Ross Langmead is professor of missiology and director of School of World Mission at Whitley College, the Baptist Theological College of Victoria, Australia.

[originally published at EthicsDaily.com]

the Bible tells me so

2004-12-14T08:03:00.000-08:00

"Most of the people in nut houses are religious because most Americans are religious," said Rodney Stark, a social sciences professor at Baylor University. "We know what causes schizophrenia and it isn't going to church. It's biochemical." ....in some fundamentalist environments, symptoms of mental illness can appear normal: Obsession over a religious leader can be interpreted as religious fervor, and delusions can be interpreted as religious visions....while religion doesn't cause mental illness, he believes existing conditions can be inflamed by religious environments where leaders demand absolute obedience and claim to speak for God. People with schizophrenia, personality disorders and a host of other mental disorders may be drawn such faiths for their structure, he said. "This kind of culture, religious atmosphere, group dynamic can set up a situation where that person is more likely to act out in aggressive ways under tremendous pressure," Olson said.

...read it all: Moms who kill children have religion in common

Genesis 22:

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."

waiting for the light . . . in Baghdad

2004-12-10T17:32:00.000-08:00

BAGHDAD - 10 December 2004

A member of the Christian Peacekeepers Team in Iraq sends this report

Last week I read a news report that said up to seven Iraqis are kidnapped every day. Today I found out that CPT's neighbour might be one of them. He was driving from Baghdad to Kirkuk when he disappeared. Sometimes kidnappers ask for ransom, sometimes thieves kill the victim and keep the money, phone, and car. It has been seven days since my neighbour disappeared.

He has three children: *Mohammed (8) and Esam (6), my two miniature bodyguards who always insist on walking me down the street, and their sister Fatima (2). When I visited, their mother Um Mohammed sat on the living room floor and wept. The boys smiled hesitantly at me and did not know how to comfort her.

TheBy have always welcomed me to their home. Now they are shattered. "Allah Kareem, Allah Kareem (God is generous)," whispered Um Mohammed's elderly mother. She begged CPT to pray for them. All they can do now is sit by the phone and wait.

These past days, large explosions have shaken our apartment. On Saturday we ran up to the roof to assess the damage. Black smoke billowed across the river. I have become numb to explosions, but this time I started weeping because I could tell from its size that people were dying. In fact, 70 people have died in Iraq these past three days.

Why is everything falling apart? From the perspective of the Western countries, it is easy to point at the Iraqi resistance, the foreign terrorists, the common thieves. And they surely cause terrible damage with the use of violence. But from the perspective of those who are bombed, what is the difference between an insurgency bomb dropped on my street and a US bomb dropped on a Fallujah clinic? An explosion is an explosion is an explosion.

There is rhetoric of "good guys" and "bad guys," but from here it all feels meaningless in the rubble of a home bombed by US fighter jets, a school shattered by a terrorist attack, a kidnapped father, a child accidentally shot by Coalition soldiers. Violence begets violence begets violence. It is all starting to blend together.

It is difficult to find hope. But I hear that a sheikh in a violent Baghdad neighbourhood is gathering people to do nonviolent resistance. Another Iraqi human rights worker and friend is building a network of local peace activists. And tomorrow I will visit Noor and Abu Zayneb to cuddle their three-month old treasure, baby Hamsa. She will be hope for now.

What can we do in the West? Try to break the pattern of greed and fear. Tell young people they can resist registering for the draft. Listen to a soldier's story and learn what war is really like. Find a peace community and try to build it, step by step.

It is a dark time now. We live in constant Advent, waiting, waiting in the darkness.

Advent reflection from Baghdad, Independent Catholic News

what we must do

2004-12-07T10:47:00.000-08:00

We will continue to need brave and self-sacrificing religious and political leaders who will endure the coming fury which will not soon subside but likely increase. We need religious and political leaders from every community who will thrust the best of their progressive traditions into the limelight without timidity.

Religious leaders must shine the spotlight on the best teachings of the great prophets and the sacred texts. We Christians must emphasize the prophetic principles of Jesus which have been submerged by Christian fundamentalists.

We religious nonconformists must take the offensive and call all fundamentalists to account on their own misuse of Scripture.

We followers of Jesus must not be ashamed to speak about his demand for a morality that values integrity, liberality and justice in the social sphere.

We cannot hide behind our commitment to the separation of church and state as an excuse for not being prophetic in the halls of Congress, in the church or in the marketplace.

We must protect the fortresses of higher learning and not be afraid but proud of being labeled as a liberal.

We must confess that we often prefer the label moderate because it is safer, not more moral.

. . . read it all: Are These the New Dark Ages?, by by G. Michael Greer, EthicsDaily.com, via Jesus Politics.

surprised to hear there is a Christian Left?

2004-12-05T08:48:00.000-08:00

In the late 1960s, the concept of Christianity as a liberal or even hippie religion didn't seem as foreign as it does after two decades of vocal fundamentalism. Nowadays, the word "Christian" more often than not summons up images of people like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, men who have built franchises by preaching extremist positions.

"People are usually pretty surprised to hear there is a Christian Left," says Mark Thomas, a Denver hospital chaplain. "If you ask some of the very educated and spiritually sophisticated people in Boulder what Christianity is about, you'll often hear it's about abortion and gay marriage, two issues that Jesus and Gospels don't have a single word to say about. What Jesus does have a lot to say about is taking care of the most vulnerable among us, loving our enemies, turning the other cheek—these sort of teachings."

....Ehrich, too, urges progressive Christians to avoid answering the strident right wing with a similarly strident list of issues.

"What I have been encouraging is let's get focused," he says. "I think there's a tendency on the liberal perspective to take every issue that anyone has ever cared about and offer it up as a platform of issues. We can't do that. We've got to get focused. We've got to name the one or two issues that are truly worth pursuing."

To decide which issues those are, Ehrich suggests looking at the focus of Jesus' teaching and taking up the issues that concerned him: the abuses of money and power.

But Ehrich also urges Christian clergy to begin listening to the spiritual needs of their membership. He cites a survey he conducted on his website, in which he asked people to share what they would ask God if they had a chance to speak with the Almighty. The results might surprise people.

"The questions are down-to-earth basic," he says. "They have nothing to do with liturgy, nothing to do with who gets ordained, nothing to do with sexuality. The questions were all about faith: How do I believe? Where are you? Who are you? When I die, will I see my wife in heaven? Why did you let that disease kill my child? I just think the leadership of mainline denominations has been plowing a different field. If we would just listen to our members, we would know what to say, we would know what to preach."

The first step to offering an alternative Christian voice is simple, he says.

"We need to talk to each other and we need to listen to each other. It really is not much more complicated than that."

...read it all: Saving Jesus: In the aftermath of the election, the Christian Left searches for its voice by Pamela White, Boulder Weekly

carrying the crosses of Christmas

2004-12-03T13:57:00.000-08:00

Carrying the crosses of Christmas
by J. James DeConto

"There was no room for them in the inn"

As you drive south on Route 18 across the northernmost swath of Allegheny County, North Carolina, you'll encounter a roadside sign, "Welcome to Sparta, N.C." If your eye catches the sign, you probably won't have time to notice two drab, gray buildings that lie just beyond this welcome. Potholes mar the driveways. Empty beer cans, cigarette packs, fast-food wrappers, and even an old car battery litter the grounds. Electrical wires and television cables run in and out of windows, some with torn screens, broken glass, or crinkled black garbage bags where the glass once was. When I called about renting an apartment there for me, my wife, and two daughters, the landlady said the complex would not be suitable for us, but for the same price - about $400 a month - she could rent us a single-family house with a yard.

Upstairs in one of the buildings, three Christmas tree workers share a single bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Like many of the men and teenage boys who travel far from their families to cultivate and harvest North Carolina Fraser firs - the Cadillac of Christmas trees - these three have found shelter, but not much hospitality. They cram into single-wide trailers or basement apartments, two or three to a bedroom and a few more in the living room, often at $50 a month per person. Consuelo Hall, a Colombian who hears the workers' stories at her popular market and taco bar, tells one eerily similar to the Advent story these workers help Americans to celebrate: A fellow Latina literally considered moving her family into a barn to escape the claustrophobia of living in the same house with a group of male farmworkers.

Another woman, whom I'll call Carmen, lives in an old farmhouse with her partner and several of his male co-workers surrounded by evergreen fields. She says the house is very old, but has few complaints save for the airborne pesticides that sometimes make it hard to breathe inside. "I say my husband, ‘Maybe if I asleep you can bring me to the hospital,'" she says. "I felt really bad." Because he provides the house for free, this farmer pays $6 an hour. Others pay $7 an hour for greenhorns and up to $12 for the most seasoned veterans who've worked in their fields a decade or more. A recent court decision exempts the growers from paying overtime, though workers typically put in 50 to 70 hours a week, enabling them to send money home to their families in Mexico.

"Christ suffered in his body"

On a mountainside in neighboring Ashe County, a dozen Mexican men wield 18-inch knives and pairs of snips, shaping hundreds of Fraser firs into that classic Christmas cone. From the roadway far below, dressed in sweatshirts or flannels and jeans, they look like finger puppets of red and blue mistakenly conscripted into a massive army of toy soldiers. They circle each tree, oscillating their blades from behind their ears down toward their knees, lopping off stray branch ends to carve the perfect Christmas tree. The seedlings are ready for harvest in seven to 10 years, and they go wild if they're not trained to look prim and proper with annual trimming from age 3. Unless rain keeps the men from their work and their wages, they trim hundreds of trees, working 10 hours a day, every day but Sunday, through the summer and early fall. With an errant swing, the razor-sharp machetes sometimes cut into their knees, and the repetitive motion of trimiando, as they call it in Spanglish, leaves every new recruit with sore forearms.

The hardest work comes during the harvest season that runs through November and early December, when the trees are shipped to market. Mexican men - and some women - often work 70 or more hours a week, carrying hundreds of Christmas trees a day from their beds to the trucks that haul them. Some trees weigh more than 300 pounds, and even five men have trouble snaking them through the rows of tender trees waiting to be cut in subsequent years. Back and forth they walk, over hillside fields that span hundreds of yards. The hardest work comes when their bodies are the most weary. After feeding the trees through bailing machines, as the sun sets, the workers must lift them onto trailers, staggering under the weight of the heaviest trees. As the pines pile up on the flatbed trucks, the workers have to heave them higher and higher, until the packers, standing on 10-foot stacks of evergreens, start to pull on the trees while more workers push them upward from the ground.

Harvesting would be hard on the balmiest of May days, but, as veteran worker Felix Alvarez says, in late fall "it's extremely cold in these mountains. ... I used to get really sick, that I missed two or three weeks of working sometimes." Low temperatures in November and December range between 20 and 30 degrees. The workers find little relief from the cold over the course of eight- to 14-hour days spent outdoors, and frequent illness is common. "You know the cold takes a toll on a person who's working outside all day long," says Dr. Georgia Latham, a physician who provides discount services to Sparta's Hispanics. "When people live in very close quarters, communicable disease in general is much more prevalent."

More worrisome for the workers is the long-term effects of handling pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. Experts disagree on the impact of agricultural chemicals on the overall health of the region, but even North Carolina State University extension specialist Jill Sidebottom, who downplays the risks for the general population, acknowledges "the people who would be most at risk are those with the most exposure - those who are applying the pesticides." Though they now understand the danger, experienced farmworkers like Alvarez worry about the long-term effects of having worked with potentially lethal pesticides without the safety equipment now required by law.

"Carrying his own cross"

A devout Catholic, Carmen begins to cry as she considers the parallels between her life and the biblical story. Not only did she cross the desert for new life in a land of plenty, but once there, she bore heavy trees on her back, just like the man whose birthday we celebrate at Christmas. As she tells of carrying 200 Christmas trees a day across a distance as long as a large shopping plaza, her thoughts turn toward the sad irony of the immigrant experience: Mexicans are willing to do the backbreaking work that no else wants to do and on which American society depends, yet their illegal status makes them outsiders who live in fear.

"Latin people come here for (do)ing the hard work," she says. "It's very hard work, too hard work."

J. James DeConto is a 2004-05 Phillips Journalism Fellow and has worked as a newspaper writer and editor in New Hampshire and Ohio.

...from Sojourners

Baptists & AIDS

2004-12-02T11:17:00.001-08:00

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (ABP) -- Motorists in Memphis are getting a prominent reminder of the AIDS pandemic's human toll -- and the grace that God offers -- from two Baptist churches situated on one of the city's busiest corners.

For the fifth year in a row, the corner of Poplar Avenue and East Parkway was covered with thousands of white stakes with red ribbons attached. Members of Memphis' First Baptist Church marked World AIDS Day by erecting the markers on the stately church's lawn after morning worship Nov. 28. The markers represent the approximately 3,000 Shelby County residents who have died of AIDS since 1983, when county officials first began tracking its statistics.

And, for the fourth year, the members of the predominantly white church were joined in the marker project by hundreds of African-Americans from Greater Lewis Street Missionary Baptist Church, their neighbors across the street in Memphis' Midtown neighborhood. Greater Lewis Street became involved in the project beginning in 2001.

....Kim Moss, executive director of Friends for Life, said in an e-mail statement that the partnership between the racially diverse churches and his organization is providing a powerful example to the community. "The issue of AIDS provides a real challenge for churches to experience the meaning of unconditional love," he said.

The churches' effort, Moss continued, is an example of "the healing that can take place when people set aside prejudices and focus on the message of hope, love, understanding, and compassion for all."

…read it all: Black, white Memphis congregations confront barriers on World AIDS Day by Robert Marus, Associated Baptist Press

academics + evangelicals = ?

2004-12-01T09:17:00.000-08:00

Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning.

In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and about understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness. Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people reading hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.

Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours is an individualist culture; people rarely put their community's welfare ahead of their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. Churches are mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered money): those who tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing but a pat on the back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff important faculty committees. An economist friend once told me that economics departments are ungovernable, because economists understand the reward structure that drives universities: professors who do thankless institutional tasks competently must do more such tasks. Yet the trains run more or less on time -- maybe historians are running the economics departments -- because enough faculty attach enough importance to the welfare of their colleagues and students. Selfishness and exploitation are of course common too, in universities and churches as everywhere else. But one sees a good deal of day-to-day altruism, which is not common everywhere else.

And each side of this divide has something to teach the other. Evangelicals would benefit greatly from the love of argument that pervades universities. The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title of a wonderful book by evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- isn't that evangelicals aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and they do. No, the real scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test those ideas. Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself (among other things) "the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-minded questions and arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. Evangelical churches should be swimming in it. Too few are.

For their part, universities would be better, richer places if they had an infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too often, the world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder whether." We like to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic hurdles (the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act as though those ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a bigot could think otherwise.

…read it all: Faculty Clubs and Church Pews by William J. Stuntz, Tech Central Station

2004-11-30T20:48:00.000-08:00

2004-11-30T10:07:00.000-08:00

photo: The Marion Star

Giant Jesus grabs attention

MONROE (AP) -- Travelers on Interstate 75 often are startled to come upon a six-story-tall statue of Jesus by the roadside.

"I thought I had seen everything there was to see in America from the road, but I never saw anything like that," said Brad Leach, 60, an over-the-road trucker for 37 years. "I'm not a holy roller, but I think America needs more things like that."

The 62-foot-tall Messiah about 15 miles north of Cincinnati was completed in August. The torso-up sculpture has a 42-foot span between upraised hands, and a 40-foot cross at the base. It's made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, and plans are for it to be lit by spotlights at night.

"I didn't know it would get this much national attention," said Lawrence Bishop, co-founder of Solid Rock Church. "We weren't trying to impress people, we were just trying to help people."

The 4,000-member, nondenominational evangelical church was founded by the former horse trader and his wife, Darlene, who also has a ministry.

Bishop said his wife first proposed the Jesus figure as a beacon of hope and salvation. Together, they formed the plan for their "King of Kings" statue and spent about $250,000 to finance it.

"We're living in a day when a lot of people feel hopeless, but we believe that when people see him, they will understand he is the hope for the world," Darlene Bishop said.

The church has received hundreds of e-mails from motorists, some of whom say the statue rekindled their religious spirit. So many people have stopped at the Solid Rock campus that church officials had to scramble to build a walkway to accommodate visitors.

"Some people like it and some don't, but it does get people's attention," said Paul Stone, a Solid Rock member from Wilmington. "It makes you direct your thoughts to God whether you think the statue is neat or not."

The I-75 exit near the statue is marked by a Hustler of Hollywood sign for one of Larry Flynt's largest adult stores and a billboard for Bristol's Show Club & Revue adult club that features a lingerie-clad woman.

The statue "is a pleasant change of atmosphere from what was being projected," Bishop said.

Monroe resident Michele Philpot said she isn't a big fan of the statue but is pleased to see the ambiance of the interchange tip a bit more toward spirituality.

"It kind of evens things out against the Hustler store and Bristol's," she said.

Judy Grant, manager of Sara Jane's restaurant just off the Monroe interchange, worries that too many motorists will slow down to look.

"You see people hit their brakes along that part of I-75 every day. I think the church should have sized it down," Grant said.

Jimmy Flynt, brother of Larry and president of Hustler Enterprises, said there is plenty of room in the small city of Monroe for his adult-oriented store and Solid Rock Church's giant statue.

"Lawrence Bishop has his business going on here, and I have my business going on here, and that's the beauty of America," Flynt said.

the true Christian path in an unjust society leads to jail

2004-11-29T09:02:00.000-08:00

Different strains of Christianity, not to mention different religions, have different answers. A case can be made that God has no interest in running governments, his followers of various stripes having spent meaningful stretches of time in exile and in prison. It's no small irony that a Protestant segment is gloating over the latest American election, when the original church's corruption into a secular power is what led to the Reformation.

That same suspect Catholic Church has joined the anti-papist conservatives in taking credit for the Bush triumph (over a Catholic, yet), noting the strong resonance of the "marriage" issue. This brings the church full circle, from persecuted minority to arbitrary guardian of the gates.

Many Catholics, of course, don't share the Vatican agenda; as many other Christians, including evangelicals, don't share Pat Robertson's. Some would say Jesus wanted John Kerry in the White House; many would simply say Jesus has been too busy at the soup kitchens down the street from the White House to notice who occupies it.

Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker said the true Christian path in an unjust society leads downward, to jail. History tells us there is enormous power in such powerlessness. Gandhi didn't get invited to croquet with the governor and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't pulling the traditional values vote for congressman from Alabama. They lost a lot before they won; and from a strict moral values standpoint, their losing was winning. Jesus, of course, was way ahead of them.

...from: When the state gets churched by Dan Carpenter, The Indianapolis Star, November 28, 2004

helping the homeless

2004-11-28T10:59:00.000-08:00

by Doug Millison

I was surprised at the power of making simple human contact and acknowledging this homeless person as a person instead of ignoring him as a pest. Surprised at the way simple gifts of conversation and food could feed my own soul.

I was working in San Francisco, south of Market on 2nd Street. Walking to and from BART, everyday I passed the same guy begging on the sidewalk under the Bay Bridge on-ramp. One evening I realized he lived in the parking lot there, under the on-ramp. I watched him unpack his bedroll and hunker down to sleep on the parking lot.

At first, I wouldn't look at him as I passed, irritated by his begging. Later, feeling guilty, I'd pull some coins from my pocket, shove them into his hand, and move on as quickly as possible. I didn't want to be infected by whatever was ailing him.

My reaction surprised me. I support organizations that work for social justice. I volunteer at the homeless shelter program that our church offers a couple of times a year, getting up early to help cook and serve breakfast to families down on their luck. I like to think I do what I can to fight against the systemic evil that lets some people enjoy obscene wealth while others starve in the streets.

But, I realized I had little compassion for this filthy, crazy person I encountered everyday.

One day I got tired of feeling ashamed for giving him money and otherwise ignoring him. He looked so alone. I stopped and asked him why he was out there, begging. He told me a long, confused story. He was getting SSI payments, but he couldn't make them last to the end of the month. He had an application pending for a subsidized room and expected to get it within a few months -- he showed me his application. Once he had a place to live he was going to try to get a job. A mess, but hopeful.

After that, I stopped and chatted with him for a few minutes every day, on my way to work and again on my way home. I didn't give him money very often. Instead, I got into the habit of bringing him food -- pears and apples, when they were in season, going unpicked on the trees in the back yard next door to our house, or something from our fruit basket or refrigerator.

In the morning, he'd spot me coming down the sidewalk a block or two away and he'd beam a broad smile. I'd stop and we'd talk for a minute or two. A simple, human connection. Some days he was crazy, some days coherent.

I asked him one evening, as he was getting ready to sleep in the parking lot, "How can you stand the noise out here?" The traffic roared constantly above, on the bridge on-ramp.

I thought of other parts of the world where monks go begging through the streets. In addition to their own spiritual growth, through humility and suffering, their begging gives other people the opportunity to enhance karma by giving. A two-way street. I remembered Jesus' teachings about sharing what we have with the poor. Was this homeless guy an angel, here to give me that sort of opportunity, my own personal boddhisattva? The idea appealed to me.

He disappeared one day. I prayed for him. Weeks later, he was back. Big smile when he saw me. Yes, he had gotten his room. He was trying to get his act together to get a job. He still looked and sounded pretty crazy, but he was clean, off the street, he wasn't pushing his shopping cart around any more, and he had a safe place for his guitar.

I was surprised at the power of making simple human contact and acknowledging this homeless person as a person instead of ignoring him as a pest. Surprised at the way simple gifts of conversation and food could feed my own soul.

I believe we must change the system that lets our brothers and sisters suffer in the midst of plenty. In the meantime, I'd like to think that if I go crazy one of these days or otherwise find myself at the end of one of these impossible-sounding -- but too common -- chains of events, somebody might give me an apple, or a dollar, or at least a kind word, if I wind up out there, hungry, homeless, and hurting, on the street.

(This article orignally appeared in the October 5, 1999 issue of Parishscope).

the spirituality of reading

2004-11-27T10:06:00.000-08:00

....reading is all about love. That little word - eros, agape, caritas. The trace in us of the Transcendent Other, who loves all creation, who calls us to ever greater self-transcending love for and communion with all. Our reading can display the whole world and universes of people to us for our cherishing. So that maybe when we have put down whatever book we are reading, we will have taken one more step toward finding our true selves, "God in you as you," as Dunne said; the God who is love. Reading helps us, helps me, to love, "to be in love in an unrestricted fashion" (italics mine), which is how Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan defined religious conversion and religious love. Reading helps me to be my true self, the self that sees the world, others, myself, God, with the faith that Lonergan calls "the eye of love." As Marcel Proust said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Even though reading may be the closest some of us get to the spirit of contemplation in the noisy, scattered lives we lead, is that all that can be said about the kinship between these two acts? I don’t think so. If, as Simone Weil said, the kind of attention given to study prepares us for prayer, might we make the same claim for reading? What if we began to dwell on and savor the words of our worship and prayer as we do when reading poetry? We might, as St. Ignatius counseled, bring not our reason, but our imagination - so important in reading - to our meditation on scripture, and thus come to believe a little more that "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor human heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love God" (1 Corinthians 2:9).

And if we think of prayer as a quest for intimacy with God - an exchange of selves - perhaps we will ask for and be granted deeper access to God’s interiority, to God’s thoughts, desires, and hopes for us and for the world, surely larger and more generous than our own. Finally, as we believe that God "reads" us, knows our innermost selves better than we know ourselves, our reading and prayer together may help us to hope that finally "[we] will know fully, even as [we] have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide...and the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:12-13).

...from: Reading With New Eyes: A spirituality of reading by Nancy M. Malone, OSU

how to have a happy holiday

2004-11-25T08:50:00.000-08:00

So what can a person do when much-loved relatives who voted differently come from near or far to fill your house?

....It is possible that everyone will agree that they have had enough of political arguments, and that no family member would likely change their mind, regardless of what is said. An agreement could be reached to keep this year's holidays from becoming black and blue because of red and blue arguments.

....Realize holidays can be stressors for everyone, including yourself. Family get-togethers can be emotionally, physically, and psychologically draining. So try to get enough rest.

....Resolve not to overreact.

..... Quiet diplomacy is usually best, like changing the subject.

....Try to head the process off before it begins by responding in a nondefensive way. Don’t argue with the other person’s point of view. Your strategy is to intervene before people become emotionally invested and tempers build. One way to intervene is to say with a twinkle in your eye

....At any holiday celebration ask everyone to share a cherished memory of holidays past.

...read it all: Surviving a Red-Blue Holiday Bash by William Webber, at beliefnet.com

lifting up other voices

2004-11-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

Scary Times, Even for a Preacher by Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times, 10 November 2004:

In my lifetime, there's been one constant in American culture. We've always needed a good target — someone to blame for all our fears and unmet dreams.

African Americans, hippies, communists, Mexican immigrants, homosexuals.

I missed a couple of groups, but you get the point. And the reason I bring this up is that I met with a retired preacher the other day, and he put it all in perspective.

The Rev. John H. Townsend, pastor emeritus of the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles, had dropped me a line after the election. He was grieving over what he called the current "corruption of Christian faith."

I drove to Townsend's house near Hancock Park to hear what he was talking about. Townsend, a slight and soft-spoken man with spectacles, greeted me at the door along with his wife, Carol, a retired schoolteacher.

The retired pastor began by explaining that when he joined First Baptist near the Bullocks Wilshire department store in 1962, the adjoining neighborhood wasn't yet known as Koreatown. Both the church and the neighborhood were still going through wrenching changes.

Before Townsend's arrival, the predominantly white congregation was bitterly split over the acceptance of African Americans into the parish. Some members walked away when First Baptist decided to open the doors to one and all.

Under Townsend, the church went United Nations, passing out headphones for Spanish-language interpretation of services. Then Townsend brought in a Korean minister, followed by a Filipino minister, and the church became a beacon in a time of racial division, celebrating cultural differences in God's name.

So it should come as no surprise that Townsend wasn't too happy with the role "Christianity" played in the recent presidential election. From where he sits, Christianity was used to divide and conquer.

"This is a scary time," he said. He wonders if the spreading stain of hypocrisy will drive some people away from faith, because under the guise of morality, bigotry was used to get the vote out for President Bush.

"I felt manipulated," Pastor Townsend said in reference to the "hubbub raised by the religious right" over homosexuality in particular. "There was this attitude of triumphalism."

Townsend said he was having a conversation with colleagues before the election when someone asked what they should say about the gay issue.

"The answer was that we should say what Jesus said about it. Nothing."

One corruption of the faith, Townsend says, is the selective use of biblical passages by the religious right. Interpreting literally, he pointed out, you can use the Bible to perpetrate all manner of horrors.

"In Psalms, there's a passage about when the enemy comes, you should bash the heads of children against the stones," he said, going on to cite several more examples.

"The Bible must be read contextually, and the real test for us today is: What would Jesus say or do? If he's our touchstone, and Jesus says love your neighbor, that seems more Christian to me than judge your neighbor."

On the very day I write this column, the Rev. Jerry Falwell has launched something called the Faith and Values Coalition to capture the momentum of the Nov. 2 election.

The idea of this "21st century Moral Majority," as Falwell called it, is to "maintain an evangelical revolution of voters who will continue to go to the polls to vote Christian."

One might question the wisdom of an evangelical uprising at a time when we're trying to convince the Arab world we're not anti-Muslim oil raiders. It also seems fair to ask what exactly it means to punch a ballot like a true Christian.

Is it Christian to vote for a man who is pro-life and yet calls himself the war president; who gives tax breaks to millionaires while 40 million people have no health insurance; and who has not exactly been the most faithful steward of a fragile planet that was ostensibly the work of the creator?

There's nothing wrong with vigorously debating Christian values, Townsend says.

"Absolutes escape us."

But President Bush has left no room for that discussion.

"This business of Bush's about reporting to a higher authority, well, I don't say he shouldn't feel that way. But why does he have to tell us? That's what I mean by triumphalism. How can I answer his claim if he's getting this from direct revelation? It pulls the plug on reasonable discourse.

"Isaiah said, 'Come, let us reason together, says the Lord.' "

So how exactly does one reverse the tide of an evangelical revolution and the cheapening of Christianity?

"By lifting up other voices," Townsend says. Last Sunday, he gave the sermon at Fairview Community Church in Costa Mesa and called for "a new hearing of the gospel."

"As has often been said," he told the congregation, "the ground is level at the foot of Jesus' cross. No one is superior there; no one is inferior."

Townsend ended his sermon with the same simple idea he shared with me at the end of our conversation — an idea that has guided him since he began his L.A. ministry more than 40 years ago. "Jesus laid it out when he said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' "

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

"I am proud to be a liberal"

2004-11-17T14:58:00.000-08:00

From "Why I Am Proud to Be a Liberal" by Henlee Barnette, at The Baptist Studies Bulletin:

Liberal-bashing has become a favorite pastime. Religious fundamentalists and extreme talk show hosts are at it continuously. They deconstruct and demonize those who do not agree with their ideology. Rush Limbaugh is the "top gun" in bashing Democrats. He calls them idiots, imbeciles, fools, liars and nuts. He calls women feminazis and babes. Other talk show hosts, who are wannabes, echo the same sophistry.

I am proud to be a liberal and to be identified with the liberals. Below I state why.

1. I am a liberal because they have compassionate character. All seven dictionaries in my house characterize a liberal as someone who is free from prejudice, favoring more civil liberty and generous. Moreover, liberals favor policies of reform and progress.

2. I am a liberal because our Constitution is liberal. "We the people" produced the Constitution "to promote," among other things, "the general welfare," and to secure the "Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." The Declaration of Independence declares that Americans are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" - and when the "Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." Over half of the Amendments to The Bill of Rights have to do with human rights, progressively achieved. These documents of democracy are progressive and call for reform in government when it fails to preserve and practice these values.

3. I am a liberal because I know what it is like to work under a conservative and an oppressive economic system. In the "good old days" (1925-1935) I worked in a cotton mill ten hours per day, five and one-half days per week. Beginning pay was eighteen cents per hour. There was no medical care, no retirement program, no minimum working hours, and no minimum wage. A worker could be fired for no reason at all. All members of the family had to work to survive. This was so-called "free enterprise." Progressive liberals changed the system and we now have legislation that provides a quality of life more in harmony with the principles of The Constitution, the Declaration, and the Bible. Practice of these principles saved us from revolution that plagues other nations.

Neo-cons denounce economic and social progress led by liberals: minimum wages and working hours, Medicare, Social Security, and welfare for the poor. (Conservatives oppose welfare for the poor, but not for the corporate welfare.) Ironically, they gladly accept these government services for their retired parents and grandparents and will for themselves when they become older. Too, they argue for less big government and fiscal responsibility. But that is changing with the Bush administration. Government control of all areas of our lives is occurring and we have the largest US debt in history.

4. I am a liberal because Jesus was one. (See my article "Jesus was a Liberal," Baptists Today, Nov 20, 1997.) His mission was one of liberation. He was anointed to preach the good news to the poor, recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Isaiah 61:1-2; Luke 4:16-19). Jesus came to liberate us from sin (Matt 1 :21). He is a liberal because He put human need above ecclesiastical law (Mark 3:1-6; Mark 2:23-28; Luke 6:1-5).

Jesus liberates little children (Mark 10:14). He liberated women by providing them with a place in His ministry (Luke 8:1-3; Mark 15:40-41). They financially supported His ministry (Luke 8:2-3), stood by Him at the Cross (Matt 27:55-56; John 19:25-27) and were first to witness His resurrection and to carry the joyful news to the deserting disciples (Matt 28: 1-10).

Jesus was a liberal because he was inclusive. He included Gentiles in the embrace of His grace and the orthodox sought to kill Him (Luke 4:16-30). Jesus was ecumenical. His disciples discovered someone casting out devils in Jesus' name but did not follow Him and they tried to stop him. Jesus rebuked their narrow view (Luke 9:49- 50). As Christians we are all one in Christ so "that the world may believe" (John 17:21). For these reasons and much more I am a Jesus liberal who puts love above law, righteousness above ritual, justice above injustice and mercy above meanness.

The promise and perils of talking about God in public

2004-11-17T13:54:00.000-08:00

That's the title of the latest religionlink.org resource guide for journalists resource guide for journalists. Excerpt:

From the White House to the waffle house, people talk about God. The role of religious groups, issues and voters in the recent election shows the importance people place on God and God's will in this country. Yet while religions encourage believers to communicate with God through prayer and meditation, hearing back from God - and talking about it in public - is a touchy subject.

Some listen for the "still, small voice" that Elijah heard in the Bible. The Quakers seek God in silence. Some believers say they feel God's guidance through people and events in their lives. Others perceive God through faithfulness to the laws or rituals of their tradition. And some people claim to literally hear the voice of God.

Questions arise when people publicly explain their actions as being directed by God. Is it true? How do we judge? Such claims are confusing when different groups say God is guiding them to do opposing things. And it gets downright scary when people claim God is directing them to do things that harm or exploit others.

Most faith traditions have ways communities or leaders evaluate people's sense of God's direction in their lives. But how should society respond when private devotions lead to public actions that affect others?

Why it matters
At a time when many issues in America are tied to religion and treatment of "neighbor," large numbers of people and groups say they are seeking, through their public actions, to be faithful to what they believe is God's will.

Questions for reporters
• How do people experience the voice of God?
• How do people of different faith backgrounds understand the idea of the voice of God?
• If someone believes God is speaking to them, how can they express that without arousing suspicion, fear and ridicule?
• What practices do faith communities engage in to test whether something is actually God's will or not?
• How do religious leaders suggest that members - and society at large - deal with people's sense of God's direction, when different people sense different and opposing things?
• How do people distinguish between random thoughts and direction from God?
• Can talking about the way they understand and experience the voice of God build bridges between people of different faiths?

why we need more media coverage of right-wing Christians

2004-11-12T18:07:00.000-08:00

Kevin Drum makes a good point about the lack of serious media attention to right-wing Christians that might inform a real debate about "values" and religion in politics:

Whether or not the national press has a liberal bias in its actual reporting, it's indisputable that most of the reporters themselves are standard issue social liberals. Thus, while they may or may not approve of, say, radical environmentalists, they write about them anyway. Why? Because they're aware of them. They are, roughly speaking, part of their social circle. They are comprehensible. They make good copy.

For the most part, though, they don't write about radical Bible Belt Christians. Sure, there's an occasional piece when a judge smacks a two-ton monument of the Ten Commandments on his courthouse lawn, but that's about it. Why? I don't think it's so much a conscious decision, as Bob suggests, but rather that most reporters are barely aware they exist. Christian extremists are decidedly not part of their social circle, and writing about them is more akin to anthropology than reporting.

But there's a bit more to it than that. Lefty extremists actively crave attention. They organize marches in cities, they chain themselves to redwood trees, they toss buckets of blood on women in fur coats. They want the national press to write about them.

Bible Belt Christians, by contrast, don't. For the most part, they are an insular group, sending their newsletters to each others, attending each others' conferences, and mobilizing voters in their own churches.

The result of all this is that most Americans are well aware of lefty extremism, even though the actual number of lefty extremists is fairly small. And to a lot of people, they look pretty scary.

But most Americans aren't well aware of Christian extremism. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson occasionally show up on morning chat shows, and sometimes they slip up and say something scary, but not often. Thus, when something like this screed by Frank Pastore shows up in the LA Times, readers are shocked. What they don't realize is that within their own fire and brimstone circles, this kind of talk is commonplace among Bible Belt Christians. And there are way more of them than there are members of the Earth Liberation Front.

If more people knew about this — really knew about it — they'd find it scarier than a few isolated nutballs who drive nails into old growth trees. But they don't. And the reason they don't is because our media really does have a liberal bias. Unfortunately, it's not one that does liberals any favors.

Drum's post links to Christian Conservatives Must Not Compromise by Frank Pastore.

the gap

2004-11-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

....people of faith do not understand God operating in the world in the same way. The vast majority of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians see themselves embroiled in an apocalyptic battle against evil. They are on God's side, and they are fighting Satan's emissaries in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Hollywood.

Progressive Christians do not shy from a spiritual battle against those forces that do great damage to human dignity and the environment. But they do not see history as inevitable, nor is God hell-bent on bringing about the end of the world. While specific acts can be called evil - for instance, the massacres in the Sudan - they do not aim to color a map of the world into two hues, the children of light and the children of darkness.

All to say, Christians in the U.S. today do not simply disagree on a hierarchy of values. They read the Bible quite differently and express their faith in Jesus in radically distinct ways. I award Thomas Friedman, columnist of The New York Times, with the pithy phrase of the week past: We are "two nations under God."

From: God-talk and moral values by David Batstone.

UCC pastoral letter to LGBT community

2004-11-10T19:01:00.000-08:00

A pastoral letter to our lgbt brothers and sisters, friends and allies

The following is a pastoral letter to our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) brothers and sisters, friends and allies. It has been prepared jointly by Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, Interim National Coordinator of the United Church of Christ (UCC) Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and Rev. Mike Schuenemeyer, Executive and Minister for LGBT Ministries in Wider Church Ministries of the UCC. Please read and distribute to others.

November 3, 2004

Dear Friends,

Grace to you and peace on this day after the election.

There is much that needs to be said. But we write, primarily, to let you know that you are not alone.

The past several months leading to this day have been both momentous and tortuous. We have been buoyed by a Supreme Court decision that abolished "sodomy laws" in this nation, by the Massachusetts Court decision and subsequent legal marriages, by the boldness of municipal officials in San Francisco, Oregon, Mew Mexico, and New York who authorized marriage licenses in their communities, and there have been countless other acts of courage and witness for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons and their families.

We've also endured an onslaught of political slander that has driven a wedge throughout our communities, debasing and devaluing our relationships in efforts to write discrimination into both federal and state constitutions. And today, we are faced with the reality that 12 states have enshrined bigotry and hate into their constitutions.

From Mike:

"For me it has been difficult to consistently shield myself from the personal dimensions of these attacks and I have found it to be, at times, a very painful process."

From Rebecca:

"I find myself moving between shock and anger. So much hatred, so much ignorance, so much fear."

We imagine that many of you are feeling some of these same emotions. There is much to grieve today.

From Mike:

"However, I want to share with you my vision. We knew going in to this election that regardless of the result, the holy work of justice and peace would still be before us. And through all the organizing and valiant efforts to make a difference we have succeeded to some degree, even though the outcome is not the one we desired.

"We must, I believe, claim our own victories through all of this. As a people of faith, we are called to keep the larger vision before us and know that where we have made new friends and created new partnerships in this mission, we have won important gains in our journey toward equality and justice. An issue worth fighting for is worth fighting and losing, and fighting and losing again and again, until we fight and win. So let us echo the confident words of the spiritual, 'We shall not give up the fight, we have only started.'"

From Rebecca:

"Today I am reminded of a powerful lesson Elsa Tamez, Latin American Biblical scholar, shared with me and others several years ago. She says, "Imagine if you will, the women and John, standing at the foot of the cross, witnessing first Jesus' dying and, finally, his death. There they stood—companions with him in life; co-creators of this movement of extravagant welcome, healing and justice; fellow dreamers of the kin-dom of God come near to earth—and now they were witnesses to his death.

"They were devastated. And all they could do was bear witness. All they could do was look upon his death. All they could do was wait.

"But Elsa went on to remind us that the verb in Spanish for 'wait' is ‘esperar.’ To wait is ‘esperar.’ To sit, to witness, to take in, to realize. But ‘esperar’ is much more than that. ‘Esperar’ is also to hope.

"When we are called by God to be bearers of justice and healing and radical love, we WILL also be called to be witnesses to crucifixions. We WILL be called to be witnesses to losses and defeats and hatred. But those of us who are called to ‘esperar’ are called beyond crucifixion to resurrection. We are called beyond the realities of defeat to God's promised kin-dom."

And so together we write to thank you all. Thank you for your hard work, your love, your support, your stick-to-it-ness, your gifts of time, talent and energy, your prayers and your faith. "God IS turning the page!" as our sister, Yvette Flunder has said, and it is a joy to be on that page with you. We praise and thank God for you and are confident in the hope that does not disappoint. For if it is God's will, then there is nothing in heaven or earth that can stop it. Let us continue to be vigilant, creative in our efforts, just in all our actions and loving through all we do to make of our churches and our world the open and affirming, multi-racial, multi-cultural, just peace, accessible to all communities of mission God calls us to be.

Blessings and peace to you all,

Rev. Mike Schuenemeyer
Minister for LGBT Ministries
UCC Wider Church Ministries

Rev. Rebecca Voelkel
Interim National Coordinator
UCC Coalition for LGBT Concerns

[LGBT Letter, 3 November 2004, at the United Church of Christ web site]

progressive politics & religion: some historical perspective

2004-11-09T21:27:00.000-08:00

From Can Democrats Marry Progressive Politics with Religion? (They Have in the Past) by Ron Briley, at History News Network:

With the construction of the Erie Canal in the early nineteenth-century linking the Great Lakes with Hudson River and New York harbor, western New York boomed economically. This prosperity, however, proved to be short-lived for with the competition of new technology such as railroads, business was less dependent upon the canal, and the region suffered a devastating depression or “panic” as it was called in those days. Jobless workers who were terrified about how to feed their families assumed that the Biblical last days were near. Surely, God would be not let such an economic disaster befall his people. As western New York suffered economically in the 1820s and 1830s, the region was swept by a religious revival movement in which many workers sought solace believing that the “second coming” of Jesus was nigh. This religious fervor produced what some historians have labeled the “burned over district” as people of the region were exhausted by the emotionalism of preparing for the new millennium. Out of this ferment came the Second Great Awakening, Shakers, Millerites, and Mormonism. While the Shakers who advocated celibacy as a way to purify oneself for the millennium died out and William Millers’s calculations for the exact day of Jesus’ return proved to be erroneous, the Mormon faith continues to grow in converts. But the reaction to the economic plight of the region also produced more secular responses which mingled with the religious fervor. Utopian communities such as Oneida were formed to address the crushing economic burdens suffered by families and provide more communal solutions to the materialism of Jacksonian society. A working class alliance between laborers and farmers formed the backbone of the Democratic Party in New York State during the Jacksonian period.

This legacy of combining religion and progressive politics was also apparent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Populist Party, Social Gospel of progressive America, and grass-roots socialism which garnered popular political support in such prairie states as Kansas and Oklahoma. During the Great Depression, such populist radicals as folk singer Woody Guthrie combined images of Christianity and progressive working class politics. After all, Jesus was a working class carpenter.

However, this progressive strain in evangelical Christianity has been largely ignored in recent years. Democrats must address issues of war, health care, education, housing, and security in a populist fashion which is never condescending and respectful of more traditional values. In recent years, our increasingly conservative and corporate media have succeeded in selling fear to Americans with depictions of terrorism and crime. What progressive Democrats must do is convince working class Americans that the real danger is not the gay or lesbian couple living next door, but rather the increasing power of a corporate America which has no sense of values. While the Fox News channel embraces the politics of George W. Bush, the Fox Network of Rupport Murdoch produces reprehensible programming which is unsuitable for our children. Progressives must hold corporate America responsible for the lack of compassion and concern for values beyond the profit motive. And this must be done in a fashion which is respectful of families. Appearing with celebrities who spout four letter words we do not want our children to hear is not going to endear working and middle class families to the banner of progressive Democrats. The election of 2004 should not produce despair on the left. The working people of this country in places like Youngstown, Ohio deserve more than to be abandoned to the manipulations of Karl Rove and his corporate allies. From the Burned Over District to the social gospel to Woody Guthrie there is a progressive religious tradition which should and must be tapped beyond the fears and narrow faith-based initiatives of the current administration.

time to write off the ignorant masses?

2004-11-08T14:32:00.002-08:00

Brian Rainey of Harvard Divinity School adds some welcome perspective regarding the polarizing notion that right-wing, gun-toting, gay-hating Christians put Bush over the hump last Tuesday, in his essay, The Devil Made Them Do It? Elections, Religion and the American People at Counterpunch today:

In particular, the role of the "religious right" has been the focus of much attention in the media. It seems clear that this bloc of right-wing, evangelical Christian voters turned out in large numbers, as 22 percent of voters cited "moral values" as the most important issue to them. In addition, weekly church goers overwhelmingly voted for Bush (61 percent to 39 percent). The display of power by the "religious right" has caused some people on the religious left to draw all kinds of off-the-wall conclusions. The solutions I've heard range from suggesting that the left be more concerned about "personal morality" to the idea that Americans were too duped by a fanatical religion to vote for their "class interests."

First, a reality check. While voter turnout was 4 percent higher than in 2000, 45 percent of Americans still did not vote showing that a large segment of the population is still not engaged by the political system. In addition, that Bush mobilized his Christian conservative base is clear, but we should not exaggerate the supposed "right-wing" consciousness of the country. Polls have consistently shown a general progressive consciousness in America. An AP-Ipsis Poll showed that as recent as March 2004, 62 percent of respondents said that they would prefer more spending on health care, education and economic development than balancing the budget. A late October CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 52 percent of Americans believe that the US made a mistake in sending troops into Iraq.

A May 2004 ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 54 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in most cases and another CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 81 percent of respondents believe that abortion should be either sometimes or always legal [1]. Suggesting, as Vijay Prashad does, that these kinds of polls "might have been weighted for the coasts and not Kansas," [2] is an outlandish grasping at straws. It reflects an irrational (and elitist) refusal to accept that even people in the Midwest may, indeed, be more progressive than stereotypes of academia and the liberal establishment suggest. It shirks the responsibility that the left has of organizing that sentiment into something concrete and legitimates throwing up our hands at the hopelessness of the "ignorant masses."

Rainey's Prashad reference is to An Election of Misogyny and Homophobia: It's Time to Confront the Theocracy Head On by Vijay Prashad, published last week by Counterpunch.

what I hope we can learn to avoid

2004-11-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

Holy War: Evangelical Marines Prepare to Battle Barbarians (Agence France Press via Common Dreams). Excerpt:

With US forces massing outside Fallujah, 35 marines swayed to Christian rock music and asked Jesus Christ to protect them in what could be the biggest battle since American troops invaded Iraq last year.

Men with buzzcuts and clad in their camouflage waved their hands in the air, M-16 assault rifles beside them, and chanted heavy metal-flavoured lyrics in praise of Christ late on Friday in a yellow-brick chapel.

They counted among thousands of troops surrounding the city of Fallujah, seeking solace as they awaited Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's decision on whether or not to invade Fallujah.

"You are the sovereign. You're name is holy. You are the pure spotless lamb," a female voice cried out on the loudspeakers as the marines clapped their hands and closed their eyes, reflecting on what lay ahead for them.

The US military, with many soldiers coming from the conservative American south and midwest, has deep Christian roots.

[...] Between the service's electric guitar religious tunes, marines stepped up on the chapel's small stage and recited a verse of scripture, meant to fortify them for war.

One spoke of their Old Testament hero, a shepherd who would become Israel's king, battling the Philistines 3 000 years ago.

"Thus David prevailed over the Philistines," the marine said, reading from scripture, and the marines shouted back "Hoorah, King David," using their signature grunt of approval.

The marines drew parallels from the verse with their present situation, where they perceive themselves as warriors fighting barbaric men opposed to all that is good in the world.

Not terribly different from the way that Republican and Democratic voters are talking about each other these days, unfortunately.

connect & communicate

2004-11-07T19:28:00.000-08:00

The more post-election analysis I hear and read, and the more I think about my own experiences here on the "blue" coast and with family and friends in "red" states like Arizona, Texas and Colorado, the more I see the need for people on both sides to listen to and talk with each other. Half the voters in the US can't be "wrong" or "stupid" or whatever you want to call the people who voted for Bush (if you didn't) or against Bush (if you did). The need for connection and communication at a profound level won't be satisfied by the current news media however, judging from their performance in the run-up to the election. This is something that will have to happen at a grassroots level. I don't know which organizations and institutions will be best suited to facilitate such a project. But, I feel certain that until it does, increasing numbers of people on both sides of the political divide will feel frustrated.

One reason I'm starting Conservative Christian is to spotlight some of news and analysis coming from the liberal, social justice-oriented Christian movement, with the hope that this may in some small way help to break down negative and hurtful stereotypes and promote mutual understanding.

The Ten Commitments

2004-11-05T16:03:00.000-08:00

Knowing that Rabbi Michael Lerner's Tikkun is a big tent that easily welcomes Christians, I point to Lerner's The Ten Commitments: Values for the Spiritual/Religious Left, published today. I can see that the God talk might be unacceptable to many people on the left-progressive side of the spectrum, and that some wouldn't accept even the most non-denominational nod to Spirit, hard-headed materialists that they are. Lerner's reformulation of the Ten Commandments works for me:

1. YHVH, God, the Power of Transformation and Healing, is the Ultimate Reality of the Universe and the Source of Transcendent Unity

Aware of the suffering caused by not acknowledging the ultimate Unity of All Being, I vow to recognize every human being as a manifestation of the Divine and to spend more time each day in awe and wonder at the grandeur of Creation.

Aware of the suffering that is caused when we unconsciously pass on to others the pain, cruelty, depression and despair that has been inflicted upon us, I vow to become conscious and then act upon all the possibilities for healing and transforming my own life and being involved in healing and transforming the larger world.

2. Idolatry

Aware of the suffering caused by taking existing social realities, economic security, ideologies, religious beliefs, national commitments, or the gratification of our current desires as the highest value, I vow to recognize only God as the ultimate, and to look at the universe and each part of my life as an evolving part of a larger Totality whose ultimate worth is measured by how close it brings us to God and to love of each other. To stay in touch with this reality, I vow to meditate each day for at least ten minutes and to contemplate the totality of the universe and my humble place in it.

3. Do not take God in Vain

Aware of the suffering caused by religious or spiritual fanaticism, I vow to be respectful of all religious traditions which preach love and respect for the Other, and to recognize that there are many possible paths to God. I vow to acknowledge that we as Jews are not better than others and our path is only one of the many ways that people have heard God's voice. I vow to remain aware of the distortions in our own traditions, and the ways that I myself necessarily bring my own limitations to every encounter with the Divine. So I will practice spiritual humility. Yet I will enthusiastically advocate for what I find compelling in the Jewish tradition and encourage others to explore that which has moved me.

4. Observe the Sabbath

Aware of the suffering produced by excessive focus on "making it" and obtaining material satisfactions, I vow to regularly observe Shabbat (one 25 hour period each week in which we stop all connection with work, money, buying, dominating the world, and focus exclusively on celebration and joy at the grandeur of the universe) as a day in which I focus on celebrating the world rather than trying to control it or maximize my own advantage within it. I will build Shabbat with a community and enjoy loving connection with others. I will use some Shabbat time to renew my commitment to social justice and healing. I will also set aside significant amounts of time for inner spiritual development, personal renewal, reflection, and pleasure.

5. Honor your mother and father

Aware of the suffering caused by aging, disease, and death, I vow to provide care and support for my parents.

Aware that every parent has faults and has inflicted pain on their children, I vow to forgive my parents and to allow myself to see them as human beings with the same kinds of limitations as every other human being on the planet. And I vow to remember the moments of kindness and nurturance, and to let them play a larger role in my memory as I develop a sense of compassion for them and for myself.

6. Do not murder

Aware of the suffering caused by wars, environmental irresponsibility, and eruptions of violence, I vow to recognize the sanctify of life and not to passively participate in social practices that are destructive of the lives of others. I will resist the perpetrators of violence and oppression of others, the poisoners of our environment, and those who demean others or encourage acts of violence. Aware that much violence is the irrational and often self-destructive response to the absence of love and caring, I vow to show more loving and caring energy to everyone around me, to take the time to know others more deeply, and to struggle for a world which provides everyone with recognition and spiritual nourishment.

7. Do not engage in sexual exploitation

Aware of the suffering caused when people break their commitments of sexual loyalty to each other, and the suffering caused by using other people for our own sexual purposes, I vow to keep my commitments and to be fully honest and open in my sexual dealings with others, avoiding deceit or manipulation to obtain my own ends. I will rejoice in my body and the bodies of others, will treat them as embodiments of Divine energy, and will seek to enhance my own pleasure and the pleasure of others around me, joyfully celebrating sex as an opportunity for encounter with the holy. I will do all I can to prevent sexual abuse in adults and children, the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases, and the misuse of sexuality to further domination or control of others. I will respect the diversity of non-expletive sexual expression and lifestyles and will not seek to impose sexual orthodoxies on others.

8. Do not steal

Aware of the suffering caused by an unjust distribution of the world's resources, exploitation, and theft, I vow to practice generosity, to share what I have, and to not keep anything that should belong to others while working for a wise use of the goods and services that are available. I will not horde what I have, and especially will not horde love. I will support a fairer redistribution of the wealth of the planet so that everyone has adequate material well-being, recognizing that contemporary global inequalities in wealth are often the resultant of colonialism, genocide, slavery, theft and the imposition of monetary and trade policies by the powerful on the powerless. In the meantime, I will do my best to support the homeless and others who are in need.

Aware that others sometimes contribute much energy to keeping this community functioning, I will give time and energy to the tasks of building the Tikkun community or some other community of people dedicated to healing and transforming the world, and, when possible, will donate generously of my financial resources and my talents and time.

9. Do not lie

Aware of the suffering caused by wrongful speech, I vow to cultivate a practice of holy speech in which my words are directed to increasing the love and caring in the world. I vow to avoid words that are misleading or manipulative, and avoid spreading stories that I do not know to be true, or which might cause unnecessary divisiveness or harm, and instead will use my speech to increase harmony, social justice, kindness, hopefulness, trust and solidarity. I will be generous in praise and support for others. To heighten my awareness of this commitment, I will dedicate one day a week to full and total holiness of words, refraining from any speech that day which does not hallow God's name or bring joy to others.

10. Do not covet

Aware of the suffering caused by excessive consumption of the world's resources, I vow to rejoice in what I have and to live a life of ethical consumption governed by a recognition that the world's resources are already strained and by a desire to promote ecological sustainability and material modesty. I vow to see the success of others as an inspiration rather than as detracting from my own sufficiency and to cultivate in myself and others the sense that I have enough and that I am enough and that there is enough for everyone.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine and co-chair with Cornel West and Susannah Heschel of The Tikkun Community. He is the author of 9 books including, most recently, Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul and of Healing Israel/Palestine. The Tikkun Community is an interfaith international organization welcoming to people of all ethnicities and faith positions (incuding orthodox atheists) and committed to building a progressive Politics of Meaning. Please read our Core Vision at www.Tikkun.org and Join to become a dues-paying member, help create a local chapter or study group, and help us transform our society by creating a new voice: a Spiritual/Religious Left. Join at www.Tikkun.org or by calling 510 644 1200.

What Bush's re-election means for religion and politics

2004-11-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

From Born-again president: What Bush's re-election means for religion and politics:

The 2004 presidential election could be seen as the Religious Right versus the Religious - and secular - Left. Experts and religion historians say that never before has faith played such a central role in a presidential campaign. Bush was seen as the Preacher-in-Chief, employing religious language to support his policies, while Kerry was seen as the new champion of the old Social Gospel, using parables to talk about government's responsibility to take care of the poor. The candidates' different views of the role of religion reflect divisions among American believers, so Bush's political performance during the next four years will likely affect the way Americans view the role of faith in the public square. Add in the importance of expected Supreme Court nominations, and experts say Bush's win could profoundly impact the role of religion in public policy for decades, as well as the image and influence of religion in American society.

This Religion Link page includes an overview of issues (and links to resources) that journalists, and others, will be watching:

Moral values
Reconciliation
Faith as a campaign tool
Evangelicals and Christian conservatives
Catholics
War & peace
Gay marriage
Abortion
U.S. Supreme court
Religion and schools
Poverty
Faith-based programs
Bioethics
Capital punishment
Environment
Government appointees and employees
African-Americans and their churches
Muslims
The religious left
Jews
The 'Nones' - secularists, atheists and humanists

The Democrats Need a Spiritual Left

2004-11-04T18:51:00.000-08:00

For years the Democrats have been telling themselves "it's the economy, stupid." Yet consistently for dozens of years millions of middle income Americans have voted against their own economic interests to support Republicans who have tapped a deeper set of needs.

Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a society that seems to place materialism and selfishness above moral values. They know that "looking out for number one" has become the common sense of our society, but they want a life that is about something more --- a framework of meaning and purpose to their lives that would transcend the grasping and narcissism that surrounds them. Sure, they will admit that they have material needs, and that they worry about adequate health care, stability in employment, and enough money to give their kids a college education. But even more deeply they want their lives to have meaning --- and they respond to candidates who seem to care about values and some sense of transcendent purpose.

Many of these voters have found a "politics of meaning" in the political Right. In the Right wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their "meaning needs." Most of these churches and synagogues demonstrate a high level of caring for their members, even if the flip side is a willingness to demean those on the outside. Yet what members experience directly is a level of mutual caring that they rarely find in the rest of the society. And a sense of community that is offered them nowhere else, a community that has as its central theme that life has value because it is connected to some higher meaning than one's success in the marketplace.

It's easy to see how this hunger gets manipulated in ways that liberals find offensive and contradictory. The frantic attempts to preserve family by denying gays the right to get married, the talk about being conservatives while meanwhile supporting Bush policies that accelerate the destruction of the environment and do nothing to encourage respect for God's creation or an ethos of awe and wonder to replace the ethos of turning nature into a commodity, the intense focus on preserving the powerless fetus and a culture of life without a concomitant commitment to medical research (stem cell research/HIV-AIDS), gun control and healthcare reform., the claim to care about others and then deny them a living wage and an ecologically sustainable environment --- all this is rightly perceived by liberals as a level of inconsistency that makes them dismiss as hypocrites the voters who have been moving to the Right.

Yet liberals, trapped in a long-standing disdain for religion and tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underlie the move to the Right, have been unable to engage these voters in a serious dialogue. Rightly angry at the way that some religious communities have been mired in authoritarianism, racism, sexism and homophobia, the liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to religion that it has both marginalized those many people on the Left who actually do have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused to acknowledge that many who move to the Right have legitimate complaints about the ethos of selfishness in American life.

Imagine if John Kerry had been able to counter George Bush by insisting that a serious religious person would never turn his back on the suffering of the poor, that the bible's injunction to love one's neighbor required us to provide health care for all, and that the New Testament's command to "turn the other cheek" should give us a predisposition against responding to violence with violence.

Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk about the strength that comes from love and generosity and applied that to foreign policy and homeland security.

Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk of a New Bottom Line, so that American institutions get judged efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize people's capacities to be loving and caring, ethically and ecologically sensitive, and capable of responding to the universe with awe and wonder.

Imagine a Democratic Party that could call for schools to teach gratitude, generosity, caring for others, and celebration of the wonders that daily surround us! Such a Democratic Party, continuing to embrace its agenda for economic fairness and multi-cultural inclusiveness, would have won in 2004 and can win in the future. (Please don't tell me that this is happening outside the Democratic Party in the Greens or in other leftie groups --- because except for a few tiny exceptions it is not! I remember how hard I tried to get Ralph Nader to think and talk in these terms in 2000, and how little response I got substantively from the Green Party when I suggested reformulating their excessively politically correct policy orientation in ways that would speak to this spiritual consciousness. The hostility of the Left to spirituality is so deep, in fact, that when they hear us in Tikkun talking this way they often can't even hear what we are saying ---- so they systematically mis-hear it and say that we are calling for the Left to take up the politics of the Right, which is exactly the opposite of our point --- speaking to spiritual needs actually leads to a more radical critique of the dynamics of corporate capitalism and corporate globalization, not to a mimicking of right-wing policies).

If the Democrats were to foster a religions/spiritual Left, they would no longer pick candidates who support preemptive wars or who appease corporate power. They would reject the cynical realism that led them to pretend to be born-again militarists, a deception that fooled no one and only revealed their contempt for the intelligence of most Americans. Instead of assuming that most Americans are either stupid or reactionary, a religious Left would understand that many Americans who are on the Right actually share the same concern for a world based on love and generosity that underlies Left politics, even though lefties often hide their value attachments.

Yet to move in this direction, many Democrats would have to give up their attachment to a core belief: that those who voted for Bush are fundamentally stupid or evil. Its time they got over that elitist self-righteousness and developed strategies that could affirm their common humanity with those who voted for the Right. Teaching themselves to see the good in the rest of the American public would be a critical first step in liberals and progressives learning how to teach the rest of American society how to see that same goodness in the rest of the people on this planet. It is this spiritual lesson --- that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and on the well-being of the earth --- a lesson rooted deeply in the spiritual wisdom of virtually every religion on the planet, that could be the center of a revived Democratic Party.

Yet to take that seriously, the Democrats are going to have to get over the false and demeaning perception that the Americans who voted for Bush could never be moved to care about the well being of anyone but themselves. That transformation in the Democrats would make them into serious contenders.

The last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked their legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by Martin Luther King. We cannot wait for the reappearance of that kind of charasmatic leader to begin the process of rebuilding a spiritual/religious Left.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is national co-chair (with Cornel West and Susannah Heschel) of The Tikkun Community, an interfaith organization that seeks to build on the political vision articulated above and more fully explained in their Core Vision which you can read at Tikkun.org; editor of TIKKUN, a bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, author of Spirit Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco.

The Democrats Need a Spiritual Left by Rabbi Michael Lerner

United Church of Christ declares boycott victory

2004-11-04T10:26:00.000-08:00

From UCC-supported boycott ends victoriously in North Carolina:

The UCC is being credited in part for securing a significant victory for impoverished farm workers in North Carolina.

On Sept. 16, a five-year boycott of the Mt. Olive Pickle Company ended with a union-contract signing held at Community UCC in Raleigh, N.C., a staunch supporter of the farm worker campaign.

The three-way agreement ensures a 10 percent wage increase over three years for cucumber pickers whose farms sell to Mt. Olive, and, in response, the company will increase what it pays to growers by 10 percent. A new grievance procedure will protect farm workers who question injustices or abusive conditions, ensuring that workers can speak for themselves without fear of retaliation, says Edith Rasell, the UCC’s minister for labor relations and community economic development.

The agreement ends the practice of grower-initiated "blacklists"—a barrier that kept some workers from obtaining official guest worker visas. "This has been a longstanding problem because growers blacklisted workers who objected to abusive conditions," Rasell says.

Growers will be required to share more and better information about pesticides, and a three percent bonus will be paid by Mt. Olive to any farmer who offers workers compensation insurance coverage.

The agreement also includes a victory for religious freedom, because a "freedom to worship" clause guarantees workers at least one half-day off per week.

The agreement eventually could cover 8,000 to 10,000 workers in over 1,000 farms, making it the largest collective bargaining agreement in North Carolina history, says Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, the union that led the boycott.

Instituted in March 1999, the boycott was endorsed by the UCC General Synod only four months later, making the UCC the first national denomination to offer its support. Moreover, the UCC is widely credited for leveraging additional religious support.

At the UCC’s urging, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the National Council of Churches endorsed the boycott in 2003 and the United Methodist Church signed on earlier this year.

"The UCC was a very key player because they were the first national denomination to endorse the boycott," Velasquez told United Church News. "To us that was very key to have that spiritual authority endorsing the issue. It’s not any one thing, but [the religious community’s support] was a major source of irritation to them."