(Ir)religiosity

As long as my notebook continues to hold up, I’m planning to liveblog the presidential debate starting in about an hour (9PM EST). Check back here for live updates. [Ht. to Matt Scott for the cool Cover it Live platform]

Last Sunday John McCain emphatically denied that his campaign manager had anything to do with Freddie Mac, one of the latest companies to receive corporate welfare. Looks like he lied.  The truth is the mortgage giant paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month — roughly $500,000 in all — to a firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager.  How the hell do you explain that John? Kinda makes all the anti-special interests and ‘no more Washington business as usual’ talk ring a little hollow.

To be fair, Barack Obama is not immune either.  He has ties to the loan sharks as well.  In fact, he ranks second among members of Congress in donations from the firms’ employees and political action committees.  Both candidates have corporate connections that should be deeply disturbing to anyone who has been paying any attention to the economy as of late.

So — don’t believe everything they tell you.  Follow the money trail.  Turn off the news and read.  Be informed. This is as good a place as any to get started.

I really wish I had more time to do substantive blogging these days (like finishing my thoughts on The New Conspirators!), but I’m swamped on the home front with reading and writing for school. Hopefully I’ll have more to offer soon. In the meantime, I’ve been watching stuff like this: a talk given earlier this month by Slavoj Žižek on ideology, power and civility. Watch it if you have the time — it will blow your mind…or something.

It’s been almost two months since I initially watched The Dark Knight.  Since then a quote toward the end of the film from has been bouncing around in the back of my mind.

“It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and uh, look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”

This comes at a crucial point in the film when Harvey Dent, with the help and prodding of The Joker, begins to assume his alter-ego of Two Face.  But I’m not really interested in that as much as I am the implicit critique of the established Order; not order in a sense of complete lawlessness and immorality, but Order in the sense of coercion and the artificial creation of consent to the violence of power. Read the rest of this entry »

…there’s something about seeing it visually.  And I firmly believe that the integrity and morality of a group/nation/state is evidenced in how it cares for it’s weakest, most vulnerable members, particularly how the strong care — or fail to care — for the weak.

To be fair, I don’t think either way is the most ideal.  For that matter I don’t think our system itself is ideal, or even less than ideal, but that’s another thing altogether.  I do think we can at least do the best with what we have, for now, until we all get off the couch and participate in the uprising Zinn mentioned.

I like Howard Zinn.  I like him a lot.  And if you haven’t read his A People’s History of the United States you need to — right now.  It’s a great book.

Al Jazeera interviewed Zinn the other day.  Here are a few selected quotes.

“[The US] is an empire which is on the one hand the most powerful empire that ever existed; on the other hand an empire that is crumbling - an empire that has no future … because the rest of the world is alienated and simply because this empire is top-heavy with military commitments, with bases around the world, with the exhaustion of its own resources at home. [This is] leading to more and more discontent and home, so I think the American empire will go the way of other empires and I think it is on its way now.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last time I briefly mentioned that in the book Tom Sine divides “the new conspirators” into four major streams: emerging, missional, mosaic, and monastic.¹  I’m interested to see what you think of his divisions and descriptions. I understand the need for identification, but personally I think there is more overlap with the different groups depending about locality and context.

The Emerging Stream

According to Sine — who cites several other notables including Gibbs & Bolger, Jonny Baker, Brian McLaren, and Andrew Jones just to name a few — the emerging stream is especially attuned to postmodern culture and is “actively seeking searching for the sacred in the profane.”²  Thus, emergents are more relational, experiential and are likely to be especially involved in or show a great appreciation to the arts and various forms of new media which are consequently integrated into their worship. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Tom Sine, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 31-55. [↩]
2. Sine, 34. [↩]

EDIT 4:51 PM EST: Here’s an even more interesting link to a visualization of the keywords dropped by both parties throughout the duration of the conventions. [Ht. Joe Kennedy]

I twittered this last night, but I think it’s worth posting.  Below are tag clouds of the words used most often my Barack Obama and John McCain in their acceptance speeches.  Very interesting.

Obama:

McCain:

I ran across this quote yesterday:

“As a virtue solidarity becomes a way of life.  It becomes the new way of living out ‘the love your neighbor as yourself’ that up to now has been interpreted as giving out of largesse. Given the network of oppressive structures in our world today that so control and dominate the vast majority of human beings, the only way we can continue to claim the centrality of love of neighbor for Christians is to redefine what it means and what it demands for us.  Solidarity, then, becomes the new way of understanding and living out this commandment of the gospel.”

–Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz in Mujerista Theology

Interesting.  I’ve often been troubled by the common practice of giving — like the rich religious leaders in the gospel — and showing solidarity out of one’s abundance and excess.  I just wonder what that means when there is no cost, no sacrifice, and no real personal change.  Naturally, my next thought is to ask whether the giving and the solidarity are really authentic or simply cheap gimmicks to appease a guilty conscience either individual or collective.

The irony here of course is that I am often feel that I am doing exactly that; and I then have to ask myself: do I really care for the well-being of the Other?  Am I genuinely invested in acknowledging the mark of the divine that rests in my neighbor?  That’s tough.

I just removed the Daily Kos from my feeder reader.  And at the moment I’m close to doing the same with some other political blogs, namely Street Prophets and Andrew Sullivan.

Why?  It’s simple: I’m sick of the polemics and the personal attacks.  They’re just not helpful.  It is blogging at it’s absolute worst.

I’ll be as clear as possible — I profoundly disagree with Sarah Palin’s politics, I think she was a horrible choice for McCain’s VP and as a result, he may have already lost the election.  I understand the move, to woo Clinton supporters who are understandably upset about the still very much intact glass ceiling.  I wasn’t planning on voting for McCain in the first place, but now I have all the more reason not to do so. Read the rest of this entry »