Christianity

MLK, the Social Gospel, and an invitation to meet Gary Dorrien on tonight's Tikkun Phone Forum

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It’s extraordinary to me how such a polarizing figure as Martin Luther King has apparently been embraced by the whole society, with street and school names and a national holiday. Conservatives like the Heritage Foundation hold lectures and symposiums honoring his legacy. He is surely a much more radical figure than any of other people who are so widely celebrated by the American mainstream in its holidays and public life. I could understand it a little more easily if he had “only” stood for full inclusion of African Americans in capitalist society, so that he would have measured it a complete success if there ever came a time when African Americans were rich, middle class and poor in the same ratio as whites, and had no more glass ceiling to the U.S. presidency and boardrooms than whites (a day that is still very far off, of course, despite our current president — as Pastor Lynice Pinkard said in church today about Obama, “Audre Lorde told us that we can never dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools”). The conservatives who praise MLK, apparently think this is what he did stand for.

Politics & Society

The Coming Obama Shipwreck

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The dramatic downturn in Obama’s poll numbers, the growing support for rightist positions, the unbelievably close Senate race in Massachusetts, and the upcoming losses in the 2010 election all point to a Democratic disaster. Obama may yet save his Presidency by moving dramatically to the left, but barring that we have to look failure in the face. Whenever any great effort in which popular hopes have been invested goes down, there is an inevitable period of finger pointing and blame. It might be better now, before the shipwreck, to try to assess the causes. We all know the dominant narrative.

Politics & Society

pain and generosity

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We live in a time of agony. The faces of the devastated people in Haiti come to shock us today. But we learn from UNICEF that
… more than 24,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from preventable causes like pneumonia, malaria, measles and malnutrition. Nearly 200 million youngsters are chronically malnourished, more than 140 million are forced to work, and millions of girls and boys of all ages are subjected to sexual violence.

Politics & Society

Haiti

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It’s not an act of God. It’s a natural disaster that we know how to mitigate: in a rich country with good building codes few die. But this is a rich world, so why are there poor countries where tens or hundreds of thousands die? Our hearts go out to our brothers and sisters in Haiti. But how much will we be family again once the crisis is off our front pages?

Spirituality

Good Deeds on a Tiny Scale

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Truly healing and mending the world can seem like an overwhelming task, beyond the capacity of everyday folks. It’s easy to feel that only big actions — starting an organization, a publication, a nonprofit, or a school and reaching at least thousands — counts. In today’s post, I’d like to say a word in favor of one-to-one generosity because recently I experienced several instances that were balms and blessings. Case One, the Restaurateur
Over winter break, my family and thousands of others attempted to visit the Academy of Science. It should have been a tip-off that vehicles lined even the furthest edges of Golden Gate Park, so, after learning that we’d have to wait three hours or make alternate plans, we began trudging back to our distant, expensive parking lot.

Environment

Good Deeds on a Small Scale No.1

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Genesis
Twenty years ago (already!), I belonged to an activist church with a woman minister, gay leaders, and a social justice agenda. I chose it and similar organizations because my life of getting and spending, work and amusement, politics and personal life, felt empty and insufficient. So I took up a two-stranded way, spiritual and political, protests and potlucks, rallies and fund raisers, services and singing, meetings and celebrations. The church became an important community to me, but I needed further growth. Let me illustrate:
Our church owned and rented a tiny house to a woman and her teenaged son who were not parishioners.

Christianity

Christianity and the crash

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At The Immanent Frame thirteen esteemed scholars and journalists offer their responses to Hanna Rosin’s December 2009 Atlantic article, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” Below is an excerpt from Sarah Posner’s comments:
The prosperity gospel is a lot older than derivatives, credit default swaps, and other byzantine Wall Street “products” that leveled the financial markets. Moreover, the fact that humans – not God – dreamed up these contrivances doesn’t poke holes in the prosperity gospel at all, at least from its adherents’ vantage point. If you believe and sow your seed, God will reward you, even as the secular Masters of the Universe greedily orchestrate a global economic collapse. Surely the prosperity gospel plays a role in persuading its followers to buy into risky financial schemes, including sub-prime mortgages.

The Economy--Wealth & Poverty

Economic Recovery or Continued Addiction?

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I recently came across a commentary written by the christian author Brian McLaren about the concept of economic recovery. He brings up some interesting questions about what we mean by the term “recovery”. When a drug addict hits rock bottom and starts on the path to recovery, we usually mean that this person is reforming their ways, learning from their past mistakes and moving forward to a better life without their former addiction. We don’t mean that they are trying to reestablish their more tolerable state of drug dependency similar to what they were experiencing a few months before hitting rock bottom. Yet when we talk about economic recovery, there is disappointingly little talk in the national media about learning from our past mistakes and moving forward to a better life without the former addiction to the illusory phantom wealth from complex risky financial mechanisms, excessive debt,and unsustainable speculative bubbles.