Bush

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

--Paul Krugman

Love our Enemy?

How do we learn to love our enemy? By seeing him as a brother who is tempted as we are, and attacked by the same real enemy which is the spirit of hatred and of "Antichrist." This same enemy seeks to destroy us both by pitting us against one another.

--Thomas Merton

Subtle Racism?

I’m always fascinated by frequent comments that racism is now much more subtle in America today. Well, one place racism is definitely not subtle is in the criminal justice system. Overt and very stark racial disparities are a matter of daily occurrence when it comes to law enforcement, the judicial process, and the prison system. And almost anyone who actually works with those systems is acutely aware of that fact.

--Jim Wallis

Race in America

Rich with symbolism and iconic images, the case of the Jena Six certainly makes for a compelling parable of racial injustice in America. And as more and more people identify with the story, its meaning becomes more and more personal. Given the number of Americans who feel they have a stake in this case, it's no wonder that presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have issued statements expressing their concern.

The story, rehearsed by now in newspapers around the globe, begins at an assembly last fall, when a black freshman asked if he was allowed to sit under a large tree on school grounds that he had heard was "whites-only." He was given permission, but the next day three nooses were found swinging from its branches. The principal tracked down the offenders, three boys from the rodeo team, and recommended expulsion. But superintendent Roy Breithaupt opted for a three-day in-school suspension. "Adolescents play pranks," he told the Chicago Tribune. "I don't think it was a threat against anybody."

Racial tensions continued to escalate throughout the fall. A group of black students organized a sit-in under the tree to protest the white students' light punishment. Fights broke out in school and at parties; a white man waved his gun in a confrontation with black students at a convenience store; and on November 30 one of the school buildings was suspiciously set ablaze. Then, on December 4, Bell slugged Justin Barker, a white student who had been taunting him with racial slurs and defending the noose-hangers, and the other members of the Jena Six joined in. During the skirmish, Barker smacked his head on the pavement and suffered a concussion. He was treated at the local hospital and released a few hours later, and was in good enough shape to head out and socialize that evening.

District Attorney Walters, who had earlier that fall threatened black students at school that he could "take away your lives with a stroke of my pen," pushed for maximum charges. The Jena Six were expelled, arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy--their shoes were described as potentially lethal weapons. Bell, the first to face trial, saw his murder charges reduced to aggravated second-degree battery. No attempt was made by his public defender to contest the racial makeup of the jury pool, nor did he call any witnesses during the trial. Bell was convicted by an all-white jury in June.

"There are several issues in this case," says Bob Noel, one of five attorneys who signed on as Bell's new counsel after the trial. "One of the biggest is disproportionate treatment. People may think of a similarly situated kid, maybe middle-class, maybe white, and they think, Oh, let's give him another chance. When he's poor and black, it's not necessarily the case. Another is funding for indigent defense: If there's no money to adequately pay lawyers, to have support staff for them and resources they can use, they're always at a major disadvantage. And the other is the issue of race in America."

--Mark Sorkin

Nonviolence

Very often people object that nonviolence seems to imply passive acceptance of injustice and evil and therefore that it is a kind of cooperation with evil. Not at all. The genuine concept of nonviolence implies not only active and effective resistance to evil but in fact a more effective resistance... But the resistance which is taught in the Gospel is aimed not at the evil-doer but at evil in its source.

--Thomas Merton

Belief

The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.

--Charles S. Peirce

The Barometer for Us

It is perfectly appropriate to love Jews in the same manner as God wants us to support women's equal rights, fight poverty, and love the poor. But it is very difficult to look at the Bible on such a pick-and-choose basis. You can't look at the verses about the Jews, women, or the poor without also looking at the verse that says in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, no man or woman, no lord or slave (Galatians 3:28). If we don't look holistically at the general ethos of the Bible we miss out on what is of extreme importance in our Christian life. Prophetic interpretation cannot, and should not, be done in such a manner. As Christians, we must defend life that is created in the image of God. We also must look for justice and fight against cruelty and injustice. That, rather than today's headlines, or the warped interpretation of the Bible based on a particular theological point of view, should be the barometer for us.

--Daoud Kuttab

Wal-mart's Conversion

Wal-mart’s recent “green” conversions appears to be much more than skin deep. This week came news that the stores would stop carrying cypress mulch harvested or manufactured in Louisiana, helping to slow a poor forestry practice that threatens many of the state’s beautiful cypress swamps. In ignorance, gardeners throughout the U.S. were inadvertently causing Louisiana’s natural storm protection to be ground into mulch. Wal-mart has stepped into the information gap to be a responsible retailer.

--Rusty Pritchard

Give Birth to the New World

As I was writing my original little ditty, "Reflections of an Ex-patriot," from my room here in north Philly, a fight broke out among some of the kids on our block. Then their parents came out and the fight grew louder and louder, until our whole block was a chaotic brawl. It's actually been a while since we've had a fight like this one. It just kept building and building, consuming our neighborhood, reminding me of the inferno a few weeks back. Ugliness. Ugliness I can hear out my window and see in Iraq.

I thought of how quickly revenge escalates from a couple of kids to a block filled with rage. I thought of Sept. 11, of Iraq. Obviously, I couldn't just keep writing about peace while a war raged on my street. So, out I went (hence the tardiness and change of the title on this piece).

I remember hearing a definition of idolatry as "something you would sacrifice your children for." There is nothing we fight more passionately for than flag and countries, biology, and nation. And so the fire rages on. But I am thankful for days where we pause to mourn, to honor life, and to cry together. I cried with a few neighbors yesterday about how people hurt each other, and I cried with a church last night over a world that can't stop hitting back. Before the showing of The Camden 28, we celebrated Mass in Camden. We prayed that God would heal the brokenness of our world, our cities, and our hearts. The scripture for Mass was Romans 8, which describes all of creation as groaning as in the pains of childbirth. Today is a day for groaning. And yet we were reminded that these are the pains of birth -- not death -- but birth. There is still hope, even on a day marked by death, and death after death. In the end the world is pregnant with hope, the hope of a kingdom other than Rome or America. And we were reminded that we are the midwives of that kingdom. We are to help give birth to the new world.

--Shane Claiborne

The Iraq Debacle

The Iraq debacle reveals military solutions to be among the least effective in the battle against terrorism.

--Jim Wallis

Handouts

I'm very grateful to all these organizations in the United States, especially the private and religious organizations. I appreciate the food and clothing they send. I thank them sincerely for their willingness to help, and I know they do it with great love. But I'd also like to say that this realationship–where we're dependent on the goodwill of outsiders–isn't the kind of relationship we'd like to have.... We're not going to solve our problem through handouts. Because our problem is a social one. And until we change this system, all the charity in the world won't take us out of poverty.

--Elvia Alvarado

Globalization

Today, globalization seems to have an inevitable logic, but no comparable ethic.

--Jim Wallis

One Brick at a Time

People say, "What good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?" They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time. We can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fishes.

--Dorothy Day

Is Religion Man-Made?

by Stanley Fish

Sure it is. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens think that this fact about religion is enough to invalidate its claims.

“[R]eligion and the churches,” declares Hitchens “are manufactured, and this salient fact is too obvious to ignore.” True to his faith, Dawkins finds that the manufacturing and growth of religion is best described in evolutionary terms: “[R]eligions, like languages, evolve with sufficient randomness, from beginnings that are sufficiently arbitrary, to generate the bewildering – and sometimes dangerous – richness of diversity.” Harris finds a historical origin for religion and religious traditions, and it is not flattering: “The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.”

And, they continue, it wasn’t even the work of sand-strewn men who labored in the same place at the same time. Rather, it was pieced together from fragments and contradictory sources and then had claimed for it a spurious unity: “Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world” (Dawkins).

Hitchens adds that “the sciences of textual criticism, archaeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man-made.” And yet, wonders Harris, “nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity.”

So there’s the triple-pronged case. Religions are humanly constructed traditions and at their center are corrupted texts that were cobbled together by provincial, ignorant men who knew less about the world than any high-school teenager alive today. Sounds devastating, but when you get right down to it, all it amounts to is the assertion that God didn’t write the books or establish the terms of worship, men did, and that the results are (to put it charitably) less than perfect.

But that is exactly what you would expect. It is God (if there is one) who is perfect and infinite; men are finite and confined within historical perspectives. And any effort to apprehend him – including the efforts of the compilers of the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran – will necessarily fall short of a transparency that will be achieved (if it is achieved) only at a future moment of beatific vision. Now – any now, whether it be 2007 or 6,000 years ago – we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians, 13:12); one day, it is hoped, we shall see face to face.

In short, it is the unfathomable and unbridgeable distance between deity and creature that assures the failure of the latter to comprehend or prove (in the sense of validating) the former.

O.L. (in a comment on June 11), identifies the “religion is man-made claim” as the “strongest foundation of atheism” because “it undermines the divinity of god.” No, it undermines the divinity of man, which is, after all, the entire point of religion: man is not divine, but mortal (capable of death), and he is dependent upon a creator who by definition cannot be contained within human categories of perception and description. “How unsearchable are his Judgments and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counselor” (Romans, 11:33-34). It is no wonder, then, that the attempts to contain him – in scriptures, in ceremonies, in prayer – are flawed, incomplete and forever inadequate. Rather than telling against divinity, the radical imperfection, even corruption, of religious texts and traditions can be read as a proof of divinity, or at least of the extent to which divinity exceeds human measure.

If divinity, by definition, exceeds human measure, the demand that the existence of God be proven makes no sense because the machinery of proof, whatever it was, could not extend itself far enough to apprehend him.

Proving the existence of God would be possible only if God were an item in his own field; that is, if he were the kind of object that could be brought into view by a very large telescope or an incredibly powerful microscope. God, however – again if there is a God – is not in the world; the world is in him; and therefore there is no perspective, however technologically sophisticated, from which he could be spied. As that which encompasses everything, he cannot be discerned by anything or anyone because there is no possibility of achieving the requisite distance from his presence that discerning him would require.

The criticism made by atheists that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated is no criticism at all; for a God whose existence could be demonstrated wouldn’t be a God; he would just be another object in the field of human vision.

This does not mean that my arguments constitute a proof of the truth of religion; for if I were to claim that I would be making the atheists’ mistake from the other direction. Nor are they arguments in which I have a personal investment. Their purpose and function is simply to show how the atheists’ arguments miss their mark and, indeed, could not possibly hit it.

At various points Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens all testify to their admiration for Shakespeare, who, they seem to think, is more godly than God. They would do well to remember one of the bard’s most famous lines, uttered by Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”