Progressive Christians Uniting

Our World, Our Work0

Living in the world is to live in physical space — our souls within our bodies, our bodies within the world. Our community, our work, our justice, and our love and compassion are lived out through our relationship with the physical reality of creation, the mystery of incarnation that’s also at the heart of our faith.

That’s why it’s such an amazing and inspiring reality to look around and see how people of all faith traditions are waking up to the truth that we are responsible for the health of all the world as we navigate our own lives — the health and well-being of other human beings, of other forms of life, of all creation. We live that out in our daily choices, and in our commitment to justice and care for all that is.

In the past few months, with many other members of PCU, I’ve had the opportunity to hear speakers from a wide variety of faith traditions on the relationship of self to world, and particularly of self to environmental crisis. Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk, meditated with us on the need for compassion towards self as the basis as compassion towards others and towards creation — and the need for self-discipline, loving self-discipline, in our relationship to our battered world which is so close to collapse. Xioayi Liao, the founder of Beijing Global Village and one of China’s leading environmentalists, also emphasized that the boundaries we place between our souls, our bodies, and our environment are false ones. We need a spiritual and very bodily love of our physical selves for healthy souls; our bodies and our souls are degraded as we degrade our environment, ignore community, neglect our own health, and focus only on accumulation, convenience, and status. Living within the physical world, and taking responsibility for our relationship wiith it, is not a matter of ignoring personal self-discipline and self-love; it is a matter, instead, of choosing disciplines of joy, awareness, and compassion for self and others. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted: Happening in the World, Off She Goes

With a Year To Go: Where Are the Democrats?0

So thanks to Feinstein and Schumer we’ll be getting a new attorney general who can’t say straight out that waterboarding is torture. What makes us so sure that if voters a year from now choose to put a Democrat in the White House, this new chief executive won’t endorse (in secret, of course) the same kinds of practices–brutal interrogations, detentions, torture, renditions, wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, etc.–that the current chief promotes? What makes us so sure that the ugly underside of American Empire will operate much differently than it does today? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World