21
September
2006
When Bob Long, the senior warden of the All Saints Church vestry (i.e., the chair of the church council), announced on Thursday that he and his colleagues were speaking for the whole congregation in unanimously choosing to resist an IRS summons for all documents and expenses related to a single sermon, I am quite sure that progressive people of faith, both in heaven above and on earth below, breathed out a collective Hallelujah. It is well past time that the question of what a preacher can preach without jeopardizing the tax exemption of his or her house of worship got a proper airing, and the only place for such airing to take place is in a court of law–not within the murky recesses of the IRS, which appears quite clueless in the matter of the difference between electioneering and faithful truthtelling. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
10
September
2006
The Right’s appropriation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s legacy is, to me, a significant if minor footnote to the overall chronicle of a triumphant conservative resurgence in the course of four decades. What the right-wingers like about Niebuhr, it goes without saying, is his willingness, especially later in his long career, to sanction the use of U.S. military power for worthy ends. My purpose is not to apotheosize Niebuhr or to excuse his susceptibility to the blandishments of the powerful. I want simply to focus in on Niehbuhr’s core insight that Christians should see the world as it is and act ethically in the light of a clear-sighted realism. For the neoconservatives and for most other Right ideologues, “realism” means understanding how bad they are–all the “enemies of freedom,” “Islamo-fascists,” etc.; yet surely a major part of Niebuhr’s realism entailed understanding our own propensity to sinning, our own capacity for self-deception and hubris. It’s this kind of Christian Realism that is in critically short supply right now.
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Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
