29
October
2006
I am a faithful reader of my newspapers’ Business sections, and I also try to keep my eye on Business Week, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal and all such vehicles written for folks in the know about money. I like the brisk no-nonsense style of business reporting but I also want to stay abreast of what constitutes the deep structure of our society–its ethical grammar, so to speak–which is all about getting and spending and the anxieties attendant thereunto. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
6
October
2006
This past week I gave a talk in Orange County titled “They Took Away My Jesus.” I told my audience at Chapman University that one of the more curious developments in “Christian” America is how little attention is paid to the Jesus who the gospels say had compassion for the suffering multitudes–the Jesus who ministered to the sick, associated with the outcasts, brought good news to the poor, and challenged unjust power at every turn. I said that people who want to consider themselves disciples of this Jesus today might want to pay a bit more attention to the substance of his life and ministry: to the redemptive life and not just to the redemptive death.
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Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
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
28
August
2006
OK, we should definitely thank Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt and the editors of The New York Times for leading the paper today with a very solid report on the two economies dividing the life prospects of today’s Americans. Reviewing and digesting multiple data sources, Greenhouse and Leonhardt give us the bad news straight up. Wages and salaries now make up the smallest share of GDP in 60 years, whereas corporate profits enjoy their largest share of national income in 40 years. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
24
August
2006
You have to hand it to them (and most of us do, via deductions from every paycheck, or annually, or quarterly), the IRS has traditionally been one of the bright spots in the federal bureaucracy. Those who study the agency nearly all come away commending it for its relative efficiency and professionalism. The Service has never shown much of an appetite for chasing possible violations of tax-exempt status, which makes its behavior in the All Saints Pasadena case all the more surprising and disturbing. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
10
August
2006
As Dick Cheney, Ken Mehlman, and the Republican noise machine start to lash out at the al Qaeda sympathizers who voted for Ned Lamont, all the people standing in horrendous airport lines today and tossing their shampoo bottles away should remember that they owe at least some of their frustration—and their fear—to Dick Cheney and his gang. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
19
July
2006
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings marched up to the Hill yesterday to show her support for a new $100 million dollop of school vouchers that Republicans say will “deliver” low-income students from failing public schools and allow the victims to attend private and religious schools of their choice.
From the Egypt of the public schoolroom, run by those oppressive union bosses, to the Promised Land of the church-affiliated school, run by compassionate soul-savers. That’s the image they want to sell, these country club Republican friends of poor kids of color. School choice, as part of the GOP’s “Values Agenda,” is quite deliberately framed in biblical terms to appeal to both the white “values base” of the party and to anguished African-American parents whose children may be doing poorly in school whether or not the school itself is underperforming. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
17
July
2006
This review by Peter Laarman was solicited by JewsOnFirst, a great new site devoted to monitoring the Christian Right (slogan: “because otherwise they’ll think we don’t care”).
Within the stream of new books critiquing the Religious Right and its malign influence in public discourse and public policy, few are as readable or as well-reasoned as this relatively brief cri de coeur by Columbia historian of religion Randall Balmer. Because Balmer knows his history so well, he is particularly grieved by all the ways in which today’s U.S. evangelicals betray the vision of their 19th century forebears, who agitated for social reforms including Abolition, women’s suffrage, the rights of workers, and universal high-quality public education. Balmer made a serious effort, for example, to get the top eight evangelical groups to give him their positions on the issue of torture in the so-called “war on terror”; only two groups were willing to respond, and they were both pro-torture. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
10
July
2006
One of the saddest things about living in what Gore Vidal aptly calls the United States of Amnesia is that we cannot seem to recall the point of issues we struggled to resolve 30 years ago, let alone 100 or 200 years ago.
I was reminded of this after reading Sean Wilentz’s monumental history, The Rise of American Democracy, over the July 4 weekend. Wilentz emphasizes how anti-slavery forces in this country, building on the British anti-slavery agitation led by evangelicals like Wilberforce, were able to persuade a critical mass of Americans with the argument that slavery should be abolished not only because of the awful suffering of the slaves themselves but also because control by violence over the bodies of others degrades the characters and endangers the souls of those who exercise such control.
The anti-slavery movement made good propaganda use of the image of a kneeling, heavily-shackled African crying out with the words, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” This appealed to a religious sensibility that ran deeper the random Bible verses cited by pro-slavery preachers; it reminded people of Genesis 4, in which God says to the murderous Cain, “Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
Preoccupied by the threat from without, the drafters of the Bush Administration’s various torture memos seem never to have considered the threat from within—the threat to the souls of those who would be expected to torture in our name. David Addington, John Yoo, and the others never seem to have considered what allowing U.S. personnel to abuse, torment, and even kill other human beings in the name of freedom would do to the characters of the abusers, and by extension, to the character of the nation. For we cannot pretend that we who permit or condone such acts to be done in our behalf are exempt from their corrosive effects.
Now, belatedly, we are beginning to get some sense of the incalculable damage that has been done, and not just at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Baghram Air Base but in the streets and alleyways of Ramadi, Haditha, and now Mahmudiya, where U.S. soldiers are alleged to have raped a 15 year old, shot her several times, killed her parents and her 7-year-old sister, and then tried to set the rape victim’s body on fire. There will be many more such incidents uncovered, and many more that are not uncovered but that will haunt the dreams and torment the spirits of the perpetrators, who may return from Operation Defend Iraqi Freedom but who will never fully return to civil society.
The lesson the Abolitionists and their successors tried to teach us was simple: we cannot brutalize others without brutalizing ourselves. Because we seem to have forgotten it, we can boast all we wish about our vaunted freedom and democracy, but in the eyes of the civilized world we wear the mark of Cain. We who were victims in September 2001 have forfeited all of the moral high ground by becoming conscienceless brute victimizers.
This is where the mindless—and bipartisan—“war on terrorism” has taken us. Unless we can recover our moral center, and soon, we, like Cain, will be left to wander in the wilderness, seeking but not finding a space of grace.
Posted: Director's Cut, Happening in the World
