The Bush II and Obama administrations and the transition from American hegemony to the “Post-American world”

This past weekend the Common Root conference was held in Minneapolis. Tom and Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates led the first plenary session, and my friend Jordan Peacock wrote the following as a summary statement of one of their points:
The Pax Americana is not necessarily the strongest ‘empire’. It stands together with global capitalism, [...]

The irony of progress

However else it may be defined, it is generally agreed that a (if not the) major feature of modernity is the pervasiveness of the myth of progress. According to the progress myth, progress will be attained in a definite, concrete form as the continuing dialectic (and, in some forms, utopian end) of history if “we [...]

Journalists arrested at RNC include Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman

We all expected the cops to use excessive force and utilize the tactic of questionable mass arrests in St. Paul. That’s no surprise, that has been a tactic for squelching public dissent since time immemorial. What is perhaps even more alarming about the tactics used in St. Paul is the arrest of several journalists who [...]

A brief musing on Paul

We now can say from studies in all related fields, including epigraphy and archaeology, that the cult of Caesar the divine ruler was not merely one among other religious choices available to denizens of the ancient Roman empire. Instead, we should see it as largely the glue that held the empire together on multiple levels [...]

Empire Remixed: To Hell With Romans 13

I’ve added the Empire Remixed site to my blogroll under the “Christarchy” category. Check it out, there is a lot of good stuff there. Empire Remixed is a project that had its birth in the “Wine Before Breakfast” gatherings in Brian Walsh’s office at the University of Toronto. I’ve written a bit about Walsh and [...]

Cornerstone seminar

The Cornerstone seminar went really well. The title of my session was “Sacred Anarchy: The Image of God and Political (Dis)Order”. I focused on Wink’s formulation of the Myth of Redemptive Violence, focused on Genesis as subversive to the Myth, and then took a trip through modern political philosophy to demonstrate how the modern state [...]

“Green energy” and Amazon rain forests

People need to to read things like this before they ignorantly ramble about how great biofuels are.
At the bottom of page one it talks about the possibility of the Amazon rain forest turning into something like a savannah or even a desert. It wouldn’t be the first time human deforestation has caused a vital and [...]

Support our troops?

This morning, my grandfather sent me an email “action alert” from the American Family Association urging protest of the recent Berkeley, California City Council resolution that declared the downtown Marine recruiting office “unwanted” and urged the recruiters to leave town. This article does not respond to that issue, but rather to the subject line of [...]

Subverting the rhetoric of American empire

Brandon Rhodes has written an EXCELLENT article at Jesus Manifesto called “Severing the Rhetorical Roots of the Empire“. In it he lists some quotes, inviting followers of Jesus to creatively rewrite them to displace idolatry and blasphemy with subversive truth, just as Paul and other early Christian authors rhetorically usurped Caesar’s place of privilege and [...]

Christians: haters of humanity

Michael Cline has written an excellent article over at Jesus Manifesto. An excerpt:
The charge of hatred is enmeshed with the idea of religious piety in ancient Rome. To be a good citizen in the Roman Empire meant to participate in the civic life of the state. The gladiator games, the burning of incense to gods, [...]

Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire, by N.T. Wright

article link
The good Bishop of Durham has summed up a lot of things quite concisely in one article that I spend pages and pages on this blog discussing. He goes briefly over passages from Romans and Philippians within the framework of a discussion of the term “Gospel” and Paul’s conception of Jesus as Messiah and [...]

Bush, Pakistan and the Bomb

This article from today’s International Herald Tribune gives an excellent example of what Chalmers Johnson calls “blowback”, from the title of his 2000 book (revised ed. 2004) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, in which he essentially predicted a 9/11-like attack as one of the “unintended consequences” of American policy towards so-called “developing [...]

First post at Jesus Manifesto

My first post as a co-author of the Jesus Manifesto blog went live this morning. It’s a meditation on Ecclesiastes, “meaninglessness”, and the nature of empire.
There’s some really great stuff being written over there, so please go and check it out. In a couple of days I will be starting a series related to my [...]

World War II and American Empire

“The formulation of a statement of war aims for propaganda purposes is very different from formulation of one defining the true national interest… If war aims are stated, which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world, and will be vulnerable to Nazi [...]

Jesus Manifesto to relaunch 10/22 as collaborative effort

Mark van Steenwyk’s blog, The Jesus Manifesto, exploring how to follow Jesus in the context of American Empire is on a short hiatus while he gears up for its new collaborative future. He will continue to write as much as he has before, but now instead of a solo voice it’s going to be more [...]

The War on Democracy

I’m sorry for the recent lack of content, things have been pretty busy lately (surprise, surprise). I’ve been meaning to make a theological post and it just hasn’t happened yet. I have some thoughts on dominion and Genesis 1 I’d really like to flesh out.
In the meantime, enjoy filmmaker John Pilger’s masterful documentary showing how, [...]

The obligatory 9/11 post

I wasn’t going to do this, I was just going to let the post about Stirling Bridge stand as my statement about 9/11, but I just wrote this for my Livejournal and thought it was worth sharing here.
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, [...]

Iran war began in 2005?

This article by Scott Ritter, hosted at Commondreams.org (originally published by Al-Jazeera) argues it did.
Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March [...]

Pentagon draws up plans for air strikes against Iran

I wish I was surprised by this. From Democracy Now.

Report: U.S. Military Planning Massive Air Strikes Against Iran
The Sunday Times in London is reporting the Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against twelve hundred targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days. Alexis Debat of the Nixon [...]

excellent article

Thanks to one of my Livejournal friends for showing me this.
Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown 
Excerpt:
But I never in my life imagined it would be so hard to escape the various American forms of institutionalized extortion and blackmail. Becoming debt free was the least of it. And having everyone you know and love believe your have slipped [...]