(Ir)religiosity

I started reading Chris Hedge’s latest, American Fascism, last week. Because I’ve been so busy this week, I haven’t been able to delve into it as much as I’d like, but I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read so far. Here’s a taste:

“Corporations, rapidly turning America into an oligarchy, have little interest in Christian ethics, or anybody’s ethics. They know what they have to do, as the titans of the industry remind us, for their stockholders. They are content to increase profit at the expense of those who demand fair wages, health benefits, safe working conditions, and pensions. . .this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom—the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is relegated to private, individual acts of charity, or left to the churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America’s god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized.”

I can’t wait to really get into this. You should go pick up a copy of the book right now. Every American needs to read it.

~bh ><>

A few months ago, I wrote a little series on my thoughts about the narrative of scripture, my view of hermeneutics and the bible overall. I realized that I never posted all of those links together. There weren’t that many and the series is far from complete, it’s an ongoing thing, but as a blog reader I think it’s helpful to have a complete list to refer to. So here you go: my humble, incomplete, and quite possibly heretical thoughts about the bible.

Introduction: Where I Find Myself
Part I: Narrative, Not Systematic
Part II: (t)ruth, Not Historicity
Part III: My Ongoing, Emerging Trajectory

USA Today has an article out about religious pluralism in America and the changing face of faith:

“A new map of faith in the USA shows a nation constantly shifting amid religious choices, unaware or unconcerned with doctrinal distinctions. Unbelief is on the rise. And immigration is introducing new faces in the pews, new cultural concerns, new forces in the public square.”

You can read the entire article here and see the interactive graph here. Very interesting. Below are the results from my own state, which has, according to this graph, not only the most “Evangelical Protestants” of any state (53%, a tie along with Arkansas), but also the highest concentration of any religious group, save Utah (58% Mormon). I’m not necessarily surprised at that number, but I was a little surprised that it was the largest number nationwide with the highest concentration.

Click here to see the full size image.

[Ht. Bob Carlton]

~bh ><>

Introduction: It Should Change, But to What?
Part I: The Community of God
Part II: Why it Should Be (a)Political
Part III: The Republic of God and the Democracy of God
Part IV: The Commowealth of God and the Castration of Jesus
Part V: Final Thoughts

Do NOT Turn Jesus On. “Not sure who designed this, but I’m pretty confident they didn’t mean to make it look as if Jesus was showing his manhood to two children!” So wrong.

Lunar Eclipse Pics. I missed the Lunar eclipse the other night. Actually, I forgot about it. Oh well. Guess I’ll wait until 2010.

Canned Cheeseburger. We’ve officially reached the bottom of the barrel. And I thought McDonald’s was bad?

Comics for hopeful cynics. A friend of mine turned me onto this a few weeks ago. It’s one of my daily visits now. Now, if they would only get RSS.

Top 40 Photoshopped Images. Very cool.

N.T. Wright says what’s some of us have been thinking for while. We’re wrong about heaven. Go figure. Not if he could just persuade some of those evangelicals of whom he has so much influence. We gots work to do!

~bh ><>

Introduction | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV

I suppose I should be wrapping up my thoughts here. I probably should have a while a ago. This ended up taking a lot longer than I originally planned, but then life happened. Oh well.

I would encourage anyone who wishes to pursue this further to pick up Brian McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus or Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s Saving Christianity from Empire, just to name a few. Both are very accessible and both address this issue much more effectively and eloquently than I ever could.

That being said, I’ll offer a few thoughts to cap off this series.

1.) Kingdom language must be, above all, contextual and vernacular. I’ve mentioned this in some way, shape or form in every post I think. And I did it on purpose. It’s that important. Our images must be visceral and real to us just as “kingdom” very familiar to 1st century Jewish peasants. That’s why I oppose baptizing some sort of universal meta-image to describe God’s dream and ideal for the world. To do that is to miss the local nature of the gospel. Word are very important. We would do well to choose them carefully. A local, contextual image that is effective in white, suburban America is of no use to the oppressed and colonized slave worker in the two-thirds world. And vice versa. Each community must create its own image and its own manifestation.

2.) Kingdom language must be communal and relational. Everything that Jesus did, everything that Jesus spoke about, everything that Jesus stood for, in some way revolved around community and relationships. The kingdom is community. A community were all are welcome and all are invited. Period. No restrictions. No stipulations. No fine print. All are accepted in this community. People are placed before legalism, before religion, and before the individual. This is a community of faith, faith being, a Paul Tillich wrote, “ultimate concern for the other”—empathetic, kenotic, compassion. This is the most basic of all. If we can’t get this right, everything else fails. Relationships are always more important. Always.

3.) Kingdom language must be (a)politically subversive. Jesus stood over and against the Roman system of government and preached a gospel that rejected and challenged the illegitimate authority of the empire with God’s egalitarian ideal. Our images must do the same. Especially now—given the political climate of our context. The American empire, like Rome, must be challenged, subverted and resisted. The absurdity of its domination and hegemony must be exposed and unmasked. And then a glimpse of an alternative type of reality can be caught. A reality not of domination and oppression, but of freedom and liberty. Jesus thought this was important enough to die for, somewhere along the line we lost sight. We need to learn to see again.

It’s getting late, and this is getting a little long. I’m almost done.

I think it is very important for us to remember that this reality, this “kingdom” while not fully realized, is always already within us, as Jesus told his disciples. The kingdom is here, the kingdom is now, not in the ways we would expect, but in the unexpected, the upside-down, the opposite, and the subverse. Almost like a disease, a cancer, that spreads like crazy once infected. Unlearn everything you have learned my friends, the kingdom is here. Eternal life begins now.

~bh ><>

John Pilger’s latest documentary, The War on Democracy, is available on DVD. Here is the trailer. You can watch the whole thing on GoogleVideo. I’m not going to directly link to it because I’m not sure how much longer it will be up, and I’m sure the more it gets linked the more likely it is that it will be taken down, but if you search for it, it’s there.



~bh ><>

Last week, I posted a graph taken from an article in The Atlantic. At that time the article hadn’t been posted online. It’s up now and you can read it here. I think it helps explain and interpret the graph. Interesting. . .

~bh ><>

I was re-reading some selected parts of Michael Mann’s Incoherent Empire this week and I ran across this timely quote:

“Like all imperialists, American ones are self-righteous. The politicians utter impeccable ideals of freedom, democracy, and humble rights for the world, and they promise it material plenty. They say they have achieved this ‘American Dream’ in the US and that they are now bring it to the world.. . .[But] American democracy today does not even seem in especially good shape. Only between one-third and one-half of American adults vote in national elections. Most members of Congress have to raise over a million dollars from business interests to get elected, and so inequality widens to a degree unparalleled anywhere else in the world. The media, especially television, from which most people get their news, are generally deferential to authority and rarely critical of their leaders in foreign affairs. American politicans rarely submit to sustained critical questioning from each other or from reporters—and the president almost never does. In Bush administration press conferences journalists typically ask a single question. When the question is evaded (which is always the case with difficult questions), they do not follow up. Questioning by the most famous TV interviewers, like Larry King and Diane Sawyer is sycophantic by European standards.. . .NBC did promptly fire Phil Donahue, the one television network host who opposed the Iraq invasion. It also fired veteran war reporter, Peter Arnett, who appeared on Iraqi television suggesting to the Iraqis that they tolerate foreign journalists in Baghdad on the grounds that their reports aided in US anti-war movement. All this self-censorship muzzles American democracy.”

This seems especially poignant now, when we’re in the middle of the chaotic, media masked whirlwind that is the current election cycle. What do you think?

~bh ><>

I found this graph in a recent article of The Atlantic. Unfortunately, the article hasn’t been put online yet, but I think the graph is very interesting in its own right. You can read the article in its entirety here. I think this provides some sobering commentary on several levels. What do you think?

Click here for the full size image. See the full article here.
~bh ><>