Homecoming or Going-Away Party? Questioning the Rapture through the lens of homelessness

This is the sermon I gave at Patchwork Central’s Sunday evening worship on July 26, 2009. Of course, these texts are not the only ones pertinent to discussion of the so-called “end times,” but 1 Thessalonians in particular is of major importance since it is the text most-often used to discuss “what the Rapture will be like.” Judging by the number of bumper stickers and t-shirts with stupid slogans like “in case of Rapture, this car will be UNMANNED,” it is a matter that is sorely in need of an injection of good, contextually-informed Biblical theology in the popular arena.

As this is the full text of a sermon (approximately 30 minutes in length), it’s considerably longer than my usual entries.

First reading: Isaiah 40:9-11
Second reading: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

[I started the sermon by recalling a story from my time at Harlaxton, when I spent the better part of an afternoon in Cambridge having dinner with a homeless man named Ian. Rather than try and recall exactly how I told the story on Sunday, here is my description of the event upon returning to Harlaxton that evening.]

Of course, as we all know, homelessness is not just something that happens in England. I remember growing up in Petersburg, a town of considerably smaller size than Evansville, and every few months I would hear advertisements on the radio for programs to benefit Street Relief and other efforts to serve the homeless in Evansville in some way. Now, being from a small town and having never seen a real, live homeless person before it was all a bit of an abstraction for me. It was hard enough for me to just get my head around the notion that there were people out there who didn’t have a stable place to go every night to sleep. Homelessness was something that, for me, only existed on the radio or television, or maybe I would have a teacher mention something about it in class. By the time high school rolled around I had a little better grip on things, having taken a few trips to cities such as Washington D.C. and seen first-hand people whom I knew would be sleeping under the stars that night – and not because they were on a camping trip with friends.

When I moved to Evansville for college I began to get a fuller picture of things, though being a dyed-in-the-wool Reaganite conservative I assumed homeless people, or at least most of them anyway, were there because they wanted to be, or because they were just too lazy to get a real job. Needless to say, since then my thoughts on the matter have changed a bit. I have had a few rather significant interactions with homeless people, like Brian whom I mentioned earlier, a guy named John who used to hang out with us around what is now the art colony, back when it was still Synchronicity, who fancied himself a bit of a traveling preacher for one. He and I used to sit on a bench either on Haynie’s Corner or on Main Street and talk about all kinds of stuff, and boy did he have some good stories to tell. I’ve been a part of the crowd at the Rescue Mission, both during times when I volunteered or coordinated groups that wanted to volunteer, and during times when in fact that was the only place I could afford to eat. I’ve never actually been homeless myself, but there have been at least 3 occasions when I’ve been anywhere from a few weeks to a few days away from not having a place to call home. Perhaps some of you have been in the same boat, eh?

There’s been a lot in the news lately about foreclosures and people not being afford to stay in their homes and all that kind of stuff. Not just people on the lower end of the economic ladder, but increasing numbers from the middle and upper-middle classes as well. No doubt the number of certifiable homeless has increased in the past year, though I have found reliable statistics predictably hard to come by. But even before there was talk of a mortgage crisis, a housing sector crash, Wall Street shenanigans, and the “R-” word (not to mention the “D-” word, which you’ll never hear out of any politician’s mouth unless he’s talking about how we’re not going to have one), the fact of the matter is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 1% of the US population, depending on what studies you cite and which methodologies you accept, went from day to day not knowing if they were going to be able to have a shelter to sleep in that night. That’s around 3 million people, if you’re counting.

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 allow human reason freely and scientifically to investigate our world. Progress enables us to acquire the technological power necessary to control that world and bring about the ultimate human goal: economic affluence and security” (from Brian Walsh, Subversive Christianity, Seattle, WA: Alta Vista College Press, 1994, pp. 39-40).

While the progress myth has come under fire in the 20th century, it clearly lives on in discourse regarding things like “making the world safe for democracy” and “bringing prosperity to underdeveloped nations”. Economic affluence through free-trade (neoliberal) economics and democratization have become intrinsically linked, and the juxtaposition of the two with neoconservative imperialism is just one example of the horrific possibilities of such a marriage. For exhibit one, see the aftermath of the attempt to turn post-American-conquest-Iraq into a “free trade paradise”, which might have had more to do with the explosion of unrest in the country than any other single factor (see this excellent article by Naomi Klein).

The discourse of progress is alive and well in the speeches of newly-inaugurated President Obama, albeit in some different ways than now former President Bush. The one thing that has certainly not changed, though, is the statement of faith that the United States is in some way a blessed nation charged with a divine mission to be a beacon of freedom, justice, and prosperity to the whole world. Obama drinks deeply from the well of America-the-Promised-Land.

My purpose in this post is not to criticize Obama per se, but I think it’s important to realize that despite the promise of change some things fundamentally have not changed – notably the public presentation of faith in the myth of progress, and faith in America as the driving engine of global progress (though the question is never asked – at what cost?). There is, however, a certain irony in this idolatrous faith.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes once predicted that his grandchildren would be able to experience a life beyond economic necessity. John Dewey believed that the visionary application of science and technology would cause the desert to bloom like a rose. Neither of these conditions has come to pass; indeed, quite the opposite has happened in both cases. Economic anxiety is at its highest point in decades, with the current generation projected to be the first in quite some time (possibly hundreds of years) to not fare, on the whole, better economically than its parent generation. And the former hotbeds of science and technological development, the cities and industrial centers, have become or are fast becoming post-industrial wastelands.

Those city centers that have seemingly reversed these trends have done so by engaging the post-industrial economy by expanding the service-sector, increasing the emphasis on consumption, rather than production, and by creating “arts districts” that are little more than microcosms of the consumer economy providing barely-subsistence labor for advertising and other corporate-controlled “creative” enterprises. In the long run, these transitory economic schemes hailed as “new urban developments” are likely to cause more damage than good as the “consumer goods” that must be shipped into these places for consumption by shoppers (who are increasingly less likely to be able to afford them or be inclined to purchase them, given the current economic climate), create their own ripple effect of environmental, as well as labor and other human rights disasters on a global scale.

This is the grand irony of the progress myth: that it promises a glorious future through worshiping the idols of scientism, technicism, and economism, and yet the very fruits of that worship undercut the possibilities of the very future it promises us. Moreover, the problem is far from “just economic”. The dominant economic systems in place have a huge cost in human terms and in terms of damage done to the creation. I do not believe it is a stretch to call the results of the current economic empire ecocide, and possibly also genocide. The fruits of progress have not been increased prosperity; rather they have been turmoil resulting in conflict and “terrorism” (conditions the “war on terror” ironically reinforces), the Damoclean sword of nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads, and the increasing murder of God’s creation, the destruction of earth and depletion of resources, and despoliation of nature. This is a murder in which Christians have often all-too-willingly participated.

The myth of progress in its economic manifestation requires constant growth (and indeed the concrete systems in place supported by the myth will collapse without it – that is the real danger of recession). This requires a planet with finite resources to provide resources for infinite growth, while the profit motive supports increasingly wasteful use of those very resources (think “planned obsolescence”). While the nations of the world have been aware of the environmental crisis for some time, it has increased, not decreased over that time, particularly over the past couple of decades when awareness has drastically increased. This should not surprise us, as “an expansionary economic ethic necessarily destroys the earth.” An economics that “knows nothing of contentment, of ‘enough’, necessarily sacrifices the environment (and especially the environment of others) iin order to satiate its greed. It is powerless to do anything else” (Walsh, p. 43).

Deficit financing and environmental destruction go hand-in-hand – both destroy the prospects of the future. “A progress-oriented, future-facing society is robbing its own grandchildren of a healthy future” (Walsh, p. 44).

In light of this, what can be our response? With the false hope of progress revealed to be empty and destructive, the only solution can be to turn to the God of creation, the God who lovingly formed the earth, to whom all the earth belongs and everything that is in it – to turn from our faith in idols that destroy and do not save, and to prophetically engage the culture with grief and contrition, but also with hope that God will be who God has said he will be, and that God will make good on the promise that all things are being made new (Rev. 21:5). I refer you at this point to the essay linked at the top of this blog entitled “Prophetic” in hopes that it will stimulate your thinking. I’m also still asking the same questions as I was in this piece I wrote over 2 years ago. In light of the need to diagnose our current problem as not just a political, economic, or ecological problem, but primarily as a spiritual problem, one that persists in large part because of the enculturation of the church and its failure to live prophetically, I think it’s appropriate to close this post with the words of the Ash Wednesday collect.

Almighty and merciful God,
you hate nothing that you have made
and forgive the sins of all who are penitent;
create in us new and contrite hearts,
so that when we turn to you and confess our sins
we may receive your full and perfect forgiveness;

through Jesus Christ our Redeemer
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God now and for ever. Amen.

May God give us imaginations to live prophetically in this time, and in the time that is to come.

Ellsworth replies

I stopped by for a quick check of my inbox today to see that Congressman Ellsworth did in fact send a reply to my email. Ok, so it was probably a staffer sending a canned response, but it’s something. Unfortunately, he did very little to address my actual concerns or engage my proposed action – which makes sense if it was a canned response. There is a lot of talk about how outraged he is about the situation and about the initial bailout plan, and how much better the one they want to pass now is. I’m not buying it. He might be outraged, but I’m not convinced the current plan is any better. I don’t believe it’s any substantially different in the base principles than the original plan over which he was so outraged.

I’m going to attach his response to this post in Word format. I usually prefer to use .PDF or OpenDocument, but my computer is wonky right now and this is the only option I have. Fight the power, view this file in OpenOffice.org.

Congressman Ellsworth’s reply to my email

Letter to my Congressman on the bailout

I’m not usually a big believer in the governmental process as an agent of change, truth, justice, or whatever, and the current issue with the proposed Wall Street and bank bailout plans is no exception. I have very little expectation that my letter will actually in any way influence the decision of the representative for my district. I wrote this more as a way to get some of my thoughts down in one place. That being said, after I wrote it I figured hey, why not go ahead and send it? And now I’m posting it here. Feel free to pass it along or to debate the points presented therein, but realize that it is not a nuanced, technical policy position piece but rather a simplified, rhetorical one.

Dear Mr. Ellsworth,

I see that yesterday you voted in favor of the economic bailout plan that came to the House floor. I urge you to reconsider your position on the bailout. It seems quite disingenuous to provide billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out the institutions that have largely created this crisis through their own actions. It smacks of elite classism to allow corporate banking and finance executives to get off with their golden parachutes and allocate vast sums of what is supposed the people’s money to clean up their mess – moreso when it’s a clean up that is highly debatable with regards to its potential efficacy to actually do that which it purports to do.

I believe this so-called bailout plan is little more than an economic version of terrorism. For one, the Treasury and Fed say “give us the keys to the kingdom” of the economy. The proposed bailout as I understand it gives officials the power to essentially take over enormous swaths of the economic sector in an essentially arbitrary fashion, which would result in the economic directors having little-to-no accountability to the people the government and public officials are supposed to serve. The Bush Administration has excelled at taking advantage of crisis situations in order to consolidate power (particularly “emergency” power) under the umbrella of the Executive Branch, and this is just one more example of that tendency.

Furthermore, the bailout is in response to what could be essentially construed as a kind of terrorist threat on the part of the big banks. “Give us billions to fix our mess or we won’t give you house loans, car loans,” and so on. Without credit the economy fails, and those who hold the keys to credit have the ability to hold the people hostage.

The plan would involved the government basically buying assets from the bailed-out-companies above market value, thus providing the banks with a kick start in capital, which is a nonsensical proposition. If the bank owners are unwilling to utilize the market functions to raise the capital, which would ostensibly be both in their self-interest and in the public interest, then the government should only buy the assets at market value – or buy the banks at their market value, nationalize them, and nurse them back into healthy operation until such time as further action can be taken – either selling them to private interests or some other action that would not only return the banking activity to the private sector but also make up for some of the drain of public funds the whole financial crisis has engendered (and the public subsidies that have been involved in the operations of these banks throughout their history). Banks that will not submit to this process can be left to their own, and if they fail then they fail. As Adam Smith said, any business that does not operate within the public interest loses its legitimation.

In other words, if the government is going to intervene in the workings of these banks, as it appears it must, then do it in a way that makes sense and will actually work to making things better in the long run, and let those who are actually responsible for the mess be the ones who are punished, not the American taxpayers.

No capitalist system has ever existed for long without having to be regulated, modified, or bailed out by the government. No national economy that is strong today got to be so by utilizing “free market” principles; all of them, every single one, became prosperous through some form of government intervention/central planning. This case is no different – in voting for the bailout you vote to subsidize the foolishness of the robber barons who got us into this mess in the first place. I implore you to reconsider your position on the bailout and vote “nay” if it comes to the floor again.

Thank you,
Jason Barr
Evansville, Indiana

John Médaille has written quite a good piece at The Distributist Review on the bailout as a response to economic terrorism. TDR is consistently excellent and I highly recommend you read it regularly.

my sister shares her story about the I-69 tree sit

This past weekend a tree sit protesting I-69 was “evicted” by DNR, the Indiana State Police, and other “law enforcement” agencies. My sister was right in the middle of (some of) the action, and she’s shared her story on her blog.

Musings on meat and the recent recall

Well, unless you live under a rock you’ve probably heard by now that 143 million pounds of beef coming from a particular meat factory in California have been recalled due to concerns over health and safety related to the improper health-related treatment of certain “downer” cows. A few thoughts:

1) I saw on the news today an anchor ask a question I’m sure has been on many minds: “why did it take 3 weeks from the time the videos of the cruelty were released for action to be taken and the recall to happen?” The reason is that it was because the cruelty in and of itself was what drew USDA attention to the possibility of there being unsanitary goings-on at the beef plant – but the cruelty itself was not necessarily a matter worthy of attention such as a massive recall. The concern was not that animals were being tortured, but that proper inspection procedures had not been followed and therefore it was remotely possible that somewhere in the tons and tons of beef coming out of this bovine manufactory a certain amount might have been tainted. It is NOT necessarily illegal to prod a cow or to pick it up with a forklift, unless you use that as a means to circumvent health codes (which are, as anyone who’s read the USDA meat inspectors’ manual can tell you, not terribly reassuring). As a matter of fact, the people at the cattle mill may have thought they could get away with it within the law, as it turns out there may be loopholes in the USDA policy. Doesn’t that just make you want to run out and grab a hot, juicy burger at your local Wendy’s after an exhilarating session of midnight street luging?

2. They seriously expect us to believe that just because the company has fired the two workers “responsible for the problem” and that everything is all better (or a least it will be soon). And, because we’re sheep who want to believe everything is ok and we can go on consuming thoughtlessly like we usually do, they’re probably right. The fact is that (just as I said about the problems at Walter Reed hospital) these practices are not “aberrations from the system”, they are products of the system itself – the system that makes it profitable to get every animal that can be killed and ground up to the killing floor in at least a quasi-legal fashion. The entire industrial meat production system is founded on the atrocity that claims what animals are good for is consumption and making money in the most efficient manner possible, regardless of consequences for the animal or even for consumers. The “protections” built into the law are a joke, as anyone who’s read the USDA meat inspectors’ manual can tell you. Is there an echo? I think I said that already…

3. If people are horrified by videos of people prodding cattle and picking them up with forklifts, I can only imagine the reaction of disgust if they learned that a large portion of what animals to be slaughtered are fed comes from bone, blood, guts, brains, and other parts of slaughtered animals that couldn’t be used as meat, which are turned into feed by a process known as rendering. Rendering is only supposed to be done from USDA-approved cows, but the oversight for rendering falls upon the FDA, and their inspections of rendering plants only check to make sure animal feed containing cattle parts is labeled. They do not check to make sure the animal parts being used come from cows that were approved by the USDA. Contrary to official stock sweatshop spokesmen propaganda, the prions that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as “mad cow disease”, can and do jump species from cattle to humans – and these same microorganisms cause a disease in humans, Creudtzfelt-Jakob Disease (CJD), that essentially turns the brain into a spongy mess, much like Alzheimer’s. Not only that, but CJD is misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s enough times to be more than just statistically significant. And the rendering process does not kill prions. On that point and several others, you REALLY ought to read this article by Maria Tomchick from Znet. Vegetarians and vegans, don’t go thinking you’re safe just because you don’t consume meat/animal products.

4. BSE doesn’t usually show up in cows for 5-7 years. Most beef cattle are slaughtered by age 3. So there’s no telling how many carriers have already been eaten or otherwise processed. CJD can take 30 or more years to show up noticeably in a human. Doesn’t that make you feel great?

5. Even though the risk of being infected by BSE-contaminated beef or cattle products is relatively low, it’s a risk that has been completely placed off the map by the corporate PR machine, with a compliant US government bowing to its whims. And if the information linked above isn’t enough to make you angry about that, maybe the information on this site will be. As I said in a comment on my sister’s blog today,

The problem will never be solved until the system that makes it profitable for such abuses to occur is dismantled, and it will not be dismantled voluntarily by those who profit from it.

Nor will it be sufficiently challenged by the government that is inextricably entwined with the corporate industry – just check up on how many FDA and USDA officials used to be industry spokespeople or corporate officials, and vice versa. It’s not even that the corporates are masters controlling their government lackeys, the relationship is too reciprocal to be cast in those terms – but any way you look at it, the government-corporate conglomerate scheme does NOT have any of our best interests in mind. In the words of Urban Seeds, an Evansville gardening cooperative, “plant a garden – start a revolution!”

Interestingly, prions also means “let us pray”, in French. So… prions pour une révolution.

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 the email he forwarded from the AFA, which was “Support our troops”.

I have to admit being somewhat perplexed by the exhortation to “support our troops”. Whose troops are they? They certainly aren’t mine – I’m not sending them anywhere, and they don’t represent me or my thoughts. It seems to me that the designation “our troops” implies a kind of kinship between us and the troops that does not really exist. Certainly it is true that my (step)brother is among those who are being sent over there, but it is not on my behalf that he is being sent, just as it is not on my behalf that any of them has been sent.

This entire enterprise of war in foreign lands has very little to do with the protection and preservation of American values, but it has everything to do with protecting and preserving business interests that profit heavily from maintaining a forced subordinate status in certain nations around the world. The United States has done the same thing for over a century now in Latin America, and has long maintained an official policy that essentially says “if you have something we want, a resource we ‘need’, then as far as we’re concerned it belongs rightfully to us, not to you”. This is the only rational explanation for the military interventions in Hawai’i for pineapples; in Guatemala for bananas; in Iran for oil (with the deposition of a popular government in order to reinstate the Shah, a move on our part whose eventual consequence was the Islamic Revolution of 1979); in Iraq not only for oil but also to create a living experiment in extreme neoliberal free trade as an example (and warning) to the rest of the world that consumer corporate “democracies” will have what they want from the “developing nations”, and we can get it the easy way or the hard way.

This critique stands regardless of one’s religious persuasion, but it is much more pertinent for me as a follower of Jesus, the prince of peace and king of all creation who urged his followers not to retaliate when evil was done to them, but rather to turn the other cheek. The unanimous response of the early church to persecution was not to respond by fighting back for their own gain, even in defense of their own personal liberties, but rather to witness to those who tormented them by showing the same attitude of Christ – loving and forgiving their attackers in the hope that they would be transformed. They believed the cross of Christ is the hope for the transformation of all doers of violence and opponents of God. To suggest that the idea of premeditated war for the economic gain of certain sectors of society (the corporate management classes first, and then to a lesser extent the consuming classes – which is to say that yes, you and I likely are beneficiaries of the violence), which was sold as a preemptive (or preventative, depending on who you ask) war to ostensibly “protect our way of life against the terrorists” would never have even occurred to them as a valid option for Christians.

Even three centuries after Christ when the church went from being a persecuted minority to the triumphant majority with the imperial sanction they did not develop a theology of warfare that went so far – instead, Augustine’s formulation of Just War doctrine carried the day. It is important to note that even Just War doctrine does not actually justify war for self-defense, to say nothing of preemptive warfare. Therefore, even on the less-strict Christian stance on war than that of Jesus himself, the type of activities in which the U.S. military has engaged in Iraq cannot in any way be construed as representative either of me or of my Lord.

They are not “our” troops, they are troops under the command of people in the thrall of the American political/business system which “make[s] unjust laws. . . deprive[s] the poor of their rights, withhold[s] justice from the oppressed. . . [makes] widows their prey, and [robs] the fatherless” (see Isaiah 10:1-2 in the NIV). They are being asked to die for a cause that, in the words of Alisdair McIntyre, is rather like being asked to die for the telephone company. They are not my troops, they are my fellow-human-beings being manipulated and exploited in more ways than they realize, and rather than praying for success in their mission I simply pray for an end to war and for the desire of men and women to make war. I pray that guns would jam and bombs would fail to explode, and that soldiers on all sides would simply lay down their weapons and refuse to engage any longer in this silly business of war. I support people, not troops, and I support them as potential brothers and sisters in the new world that God is creating even in the midst of this world of bloodshed and hatred, a new world of people from every tribe, language, people, and nation who walk in the ways of God’s shalom.

Guest article: America the Fascist

My friend Steven Kippel wrote this post, and I requested permission to reproduce it here. Just so no one who has a loved one involved with the military will hear this the wrong way, my brother is in the last stages of mission training before going to Iraq – so this is quite a personal issue for me. — Jason

This is originally a discussion on Facebook:

I’ve got an idea though, instead of being insulted because a statement might include your family, how about we think in the abstract for a while.

Just because someone you love and respect is doing something they feel is honorable, does it automatically mean it can’t be put under a critical microscope? Can we not address this issue and tease out certain moral issues?

First we should define fascism, and then we can see how it applies to the USA: Fascism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary (1983) is “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.” Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile’s entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana read: Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. No less an authority on fascism than Mussolini was so pleased with that definition that he later claimed credit for it.

Paxton defines Fascism as “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination.”

1. Overwhelming crisis: Communism, terrorism
2. Playing the victim: “Attacking our way of life” “attacking freedom”
3. Natural leader: Bush has a “unitary” legal outlook placing himself above the law, and he’s frequently talked about how his judgment should be trusted as he is the decider
4. Dominate others: Nation-building in South America and Asia, et al
5. Foreign contamination: Currently the big thing in politics is the immigration issue.

Now that we have defined Fascism and started to place it into our context of the modern USA, let’s further explore this:

The US leaders – who have placed dictators in power in Chile, Velezuela, Columbia, El Salvador, Vietnam, and all the other places we have crushed public, democratic movements in other countries to sustain our “way of life” in America – will tell you that our nation-building efforts were to maintain US industry and US dominance over world markets. Our military has been used all over the world to support US corporate expansion in the global market. This is nothing our government hides from us, they tell us it is good to have military in place in certain places as it benefits our economy. This is a merger of government and corporations: corporatism, also known as fascism.

Corporations can’t use military force to push their goals, so they have a relationship with the government to do this for them.

If your family is in the military it doesn’t mean they’re bad people. They can have pure motives, but when you look at the macro situation, the US has been using military force for the last 60 years to promote US business in the global economy to “preserve the US way of life.” This means we need to have cheap coffee because the American way of life is to drink coffee, so we go into countries and set up unjust wage systems so the foreigners can’t succeed against our business and we can have cheap coffee at the expense of their wellbeing.

Originally posted by Steven Kippel at Glocks Out.

“[I] had been living inside their imagination.”

Recently I read the excellent novel Imagining Argentina by Thornton Wilder. The book is set in Argentina under a military junta of the type the United States tends to support in our so-called “ally” countries. People are constantly disappearing, being abducted by agents of the regime, including the wife of Carlos. Carlos possesses a mysterious and wonderful/terrible gift, the gift of being able to see in his imagination what is actually happening/has happened/will happen to “the disappeareds” when their loved ones tell him their stories.

At a particularly poignant moment in the narrative, Carlos comes to a great revelation – that Argentina, under the rule of the junta, is essentially a creation of the generals’ imagination. He realizes the generals are essentially dreaming their very existence, and that “he is living inside their imagination”.

Citing Benedict Anderson and calling the nation-state “one important and historically contingent type of ‘imagined community’ around which. . . conceptions of politics tend to gather,” William Cavanaugh says:

Politics is a practice of the imagination. Sometimes politics is the ‘art of the possible,’ but it is always an art, and engages the imagination just as art does. We are often fooled by the seeming solidity of the materials of politics, its armies and offices, into forgetting that these materials are marshalled by acts of the imagination. How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about? He must be convinced of the reality of borders, and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders (Theopolitical Imagination, p. 1).

Cavanaugh posits Christian worship, particularly in imbibing the Eucharist, as the supreme act of alternative imagination. I developed several of my arguments from my last post about the nature of the church as katholikos, as universal-and-local symbiotically linked, from his conception of Eucharist and church linked mysteriously in/as the body of Christ. If our first allegiance is to the katholikos, and not to any nation, state, or economic system, then truly this is subversive practice, indeed – we seek to inhabit God’s imagination, not that of the state, militarism, or capitalism.

I’m not going to say much more than that for now, I just got back from Champaign, Illinois where Derrick Jensen spoke tonight on campus at the University of Illinois, and it’s well past time to sleep. But I wanted to leave you with a couple of questions, which you can feel free to answer in comments or to post on your own blogs, online journals, the corkboards in your dorm rooms, or whatever. If you actually do physically write your response and post it on a corkboard I would love for you to send me a picture.

1. In what ways are your community, whether it’s a faith community or simply the community of your neighborhood/apartment complex/residence hall, being dreamed by the corporations, by the government(s), or by other oppressive forces that seek to exploit or control you?

2. In what ways are you as an individual being dreamed in the same way?

3. What things you experience in your own life, whether in person or vicariously through reading or other media, give you the tools to begin living out of an alternative imagination?

4. Does faith fuel your resistance? If so, how? If yes, why (or if no, why not)?

5. What is something you can do to begin resisting in a new way, right now?

As an aside on that last question, remember that Lent is just around the corner – what an amazing opportunity not just to “give up” something out of some misguided sense of obligation, but rather to deeply examine your life to find a social/thought practice or consumptive habit that is not in line with the values of the basilea of God, to nail it to the cross with Christ, and to celebrate the breaking of its power over you with the resurrection? I’ll post more about this in the future.

Shalom!

Christ, the universal/particular, and Eucharist

One of my Livejournal friends asked this question on her journal:

Can I ever see from a non-western, non-American viewpoint to have only a “Christian” worldview? Oh, to receive truth from revelation and not only through analyzing the world through my lens. I wish I could be objective of my own self. My housemate said yesterday, “we all contextualize Christianity.” And the thought bothered and challenged me. Is it possible to get around that? Is there anyway to know truth despite interpretation… I must believe there is to have faith at all. I guess that is the role of revelation.

I made a short comment on her entry, but felt the question deserves a more thorough treatment than what I was able to give there.

My answer is no, there is no such thing as a “Christian” worldview that does not take any cues from cultural contexts, that is objective and independent of our individual and socially-constructed lenses – and this is a good thing! In the modern, Western world, people have long tried to find a rationally necessary, unassailable foundation on which to build a framework for knowledge that does not depend on cultural lenses or individual perspectives. The thought has been something like “if we can only get back to the one truth that defines all truths” then we will either create utopia (or something close enough) or otherwise gain irrefutable knowledge that reduces the whole world to a matter of propositions, rather like solving a math problem.

The problem is that over and over again those things which were purportedly universal have been demonstrated to be contingent and cultural. All knowledge seems to depend on making a foundational assumption that cannot be proved, regardless of what field one studies. The so-called knowledge of progress at the turn of the century was exposed as Euro-centric imperialism as colonial empires shattered and “scientific” regimes proved more barbaric than any tribal society – making the 20th century the most violent in the entire known history of humankind. The supposed universal turned out to be largely Western white, male-dominant, capitalist, etc., and wholly contingent upon human actions and decision making over the course of recent history, and usually calculated to benefit the few at the expense of the many. This is not to say that all of Western culture is morally bankrupt, but it needs to be seen for what it is without hiding its particular nature and its failures. The quest for universal knowledge needs to be called out by its name, “hubris”, and if not discarded in favor of a celebration of particularity and contingency then at least undertaken with MUCH greater humility.

It is no accident that the Greek word translated “to comprehend” in John 1:5 is more often rendered “to overcome” or more literally “to seize”. That which is known can be manipulated and appropriated, left devoid of mystery and assimilated into the technopolistic order that seeks to make everything “efficient” and “orderly”. If Christianity could be seen objectively, that is as an object, then that object could be grasped at, controlled. The gift of salvation would become something other than what it is, a gift – it would be made into a technique, a process, a “sure thing”. Not surprisingly then, there is a venerable cottage industry related to training apologists and evangelists in the right steps to win an argument or a conversion and pastors to write nice, neat 5-point sermons on how to clean up your life because that’s what Jesus is supposed to do for us. The inscrutable doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity; the unfathomable recapitulation where God becomes human and takes humankind up into the divine embrace, enabling us to join the perichoresis, the joyful, eternal dance of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the mystical communion of saints and the full presence of Christ “where two or three are gathered” in his name – these mysteries and more are at the heart of the faith, and they strenuously resist being analyzed, compartmentalized, and objectified.

Even the mighty God himself did not come to us as a totalizing force to conquer our puny established orders and dominate our particulars in his overarching, glorious reign. Rather, the reign of God celebrates the local and includes a place for contextualized understandings in the kingdom. Revelation 5:9 proclaims that Christ has bought people from every tribe, language, people, and nation. Beginning in 7:9 a great end-time worship service is depicted, more numerous than could be counted, again from every tribe, language, people, and nation. The clear implication is that these redeemed people worship God as they are, as people from different ethnic groups, different language groups. There is no indication that they have been culturally conformed to some universal standard, in the way McWorld globalization threatens to bring the whole world under the rubric of corporate consumer capitalism. Jesus lived as a particular man, with a particular vocation (builder/carpenter), in a particular place (Galilee), at a particular time (the early 1st century AD), living under a particular imperial regime (Rome), and dealing with a particular oppressive religious reality (the Jerusalem Temple system and its vassal high priests). This Jesus embodies a reality that transcends his place in history, but it transcends it from his place.

The Kingdom isn’t some “timeless universal” that imposes itself upon and over our local situations, plowing us into its furrows and stuffing our localities into its rucksack. Instead God breaks into our human reality in all its contingent, contextual nature through the Incarnation of Jesus and in the ongoing indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the church -the body that is universal and yet has myriad expressions in places with wildly different customs, cuisines, and communal expressions.

No knowledge is universal, just like no human political system is universal. Only the Body of Christ is universal among institutions of this world – that’s the basic meaning of the Greek katholikos, which is transliterated as “catholic”. But it is not a universality that trumps the local; rather, it is a universality that only exists in its local expressions. There is a long line of thought in the church, going back to the ancient fathers, proclaiming that when Eucharist is celebrated and the congregation gathers to re-member Christ, there is present the whole body of Christ. It isn’t just a little bit of Jesus that is present in the bread and wine of communion, but the whole Christ in all his cosmic nature. Likewise, the gathering of believers that celebrates Eucharist is not just a local expression of the church. Through partaking in the bread and wine which is the whole Christ, the whole body is present – the local expression of the church can rightfully be called the whole church, as the apostles and early fathers called local churches, because the whole Christ is present and the whole church is joined in the celebration of Christ’s victory over the powers and principalities and over the forces of sin and death in our lives and in the whole world.

God’s image that is restored in Christ and the church is too grand to be limited to only one perspective, even one supposedly “universal” perspective (which is really a particular perspective with delusions of grandeur). Instead we must give up our pretensions to God-like-ness and inhabit the world as God’s image through our Scotch-Irish-English American-ness, our Nigerian-ness, our Pashtun-ness, and so on. The catholic depends on the local and is constantly transformed by it as the particular participates in the universal, all held together by the Spirit.

It is a great mystery – “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Orwell Rolls in His Grave

A documentary exploration into how the Media is anti-democratic.

I-69 planners on ‘High Alert’

story from Evansville Courier-Press

I-69 is essentially the NAFTA highway.

NAFTA superhighway built under the radar screen – from WorldNetDaily
NAFTA superhighways threaten North America – from Asphalt Strawberry

If completed, it would stretch from Canada to Mexico and would be a part of the corporate strategic machine for enabling the more efficient flow of goods, workers (legal and illegal), and other resources across borders. There has already long been concern about NAFTA in the unionized sector of America, and the latest bruhaha over Mexican truckers now being allowed on US roads, and it should seem a simple matter of course that I-69 would contribute mightily to the economic devastation so-called “free trade” agreements will wreak on countries with more developed economic protections, as well as provisions for labor, environmental, and occupational safety interests (lesser-developed countries without these provisions being not given the chance to develop them in order to be allowed into the international business club – of course, only on the terms set by the big players, aka the USA).

The amazing thing is that in rural southwestern Indiana, particularly in Petersburg (where I’m from), people actually believe I-69 will be a kind of economic salvation for the region. They simply don’t understand that I-69 is a cog in the NAFTA machine that has already cost thousands of people in the US their jobs, and has undermined job stability as well as labor interests all over the country. They see as their salvation the very thing that will contribute to their further devastation. I can’t say I blame them for it entirely though – hope born of desperation combined with a near-unanimous message from the mainstream media touting the putative benefits of the highway are a powerful combination.

See the Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads web site for detailed information and studies that disprove claims that I-69 will economically benefit southwestern Indiana, as well as studies that show the truth about the potential environmental impact on the region. See the Earth First! I-69 site for information on local and regional action against the highway.

I-69 will not benefit the people of southwest Indiana nor the people of the United States; all it will do will be to increase the wealth of those whose pockets are already lined with the blood and sweat of those whom they exploit.

Unfortunately, evictions along the proposed highway route have already begun. On the brighter side, though, I didn’t even know there was an eco-anarchist scene in Indiana, and this weekend I had the privilege of meeting several of them.

Resistance is NOT futile! We will work to keep you updated on the situation and to provide more information about I-69 and the growing resistance.

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, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” – From the Project for a New American Century’s document Rebuilding America’s Defenses

Looks like they got it.

The document quoted above is a detailed summary of a strategy to project American military power across the globe and fits in nicely with the prospect of increasing American economic domination of essentially the whole world. Indeed throughout this and other PNAC documents, as well as other writings from neoconservative thinkers throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s the intersection of military and economic interests was argued for as an essential good or simply taken for granted. Preemptive war was touted as a strategy, and despite propaganda stating the alternative it was so clear to those in power that neoliberal (so-called “free trade”) economic policies lead to devastating economic inequalities that are likely to increase social unrest AND increase breeding grounds for potential “terrorists” that this was argued in later-declassified CIA and Defense Department documents going back to the 1990s. The neocons consistently argued that a force in Iraq would ensure stability of oil production and prices to help the US economic growth that would be necessary to sustain the project of empire (though they stopped short, so far as I am aware, of using that term).

Since 9/11 the rhetoric of terrorism and the war on terror has justified government-perpetrated atrocities, suspension of civil liberties, suppression of dissenting speech, and two stupid wars (Afghanistan and Iraq), situations where the reality and the rhetoric about why we should attack them did not often line up side-to-side. We have also seen increasing privatization of the military and its support functions. It is now estimated that, of combat personnel (that is, people who actually carry guns and shoot people), 1/3 of the “troops” in Iraq are contracted mercenaries, often referred to as “security personnel”. If you figure in the number of privatized support staff the number rises to over 1/2. These “troops” are accountable only to their corporate masters, and often they are there as a result of no-bid contracts and other shady business mechanisms. I’m sure most of you are at least somewhat familiar with the Halliburton scheme in which Dick Cheney’s former company was awarded billions in no-bid contracts, that is only one example. Rumors of graft, corruption, and human rights violations on a mass scale abound, directly linked to these corporate soldiers.

And one of the worst parts about it is the pain and suffering of those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks is still being exploited to justify these atrocities. Support our troops? Yeah, support them… support them by encouraging them to apply for conscientious objector status. Support them by bringing them home, and never again sending them into harm’s way for the profit of a few fat cats and their multitude of minions. Support them by teaching them, from a young age, that the one and only purpose of a military is to steal, kill, and destroy (cf. John 10:10), and there are other options outside the military by which they might have life, and help others to have it also.

Now, with another potential war on the near horizon, this time with Iran, have we really learned anything, 6 years later? The media leads us right down the same path they did en route to Iraq, and “support the troops” is still a verbal mechanism used to squelch dissent, or at least it is in my part of the country.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis, dona nobis pacem.

Kyrie eleison.

Read this if you care about what you eat

I don’t usually get into campaigns trying to leverage the government but sometimes even anarchists have to work within the system, and then brush our teeth later to get the bad taste out of our mouths.

Got this from the Urban Sisterhood:

The FDA wants to allow food from cloned animals into the food supply without labeling.

Please take action (quick!) here: http://ga3.org/campaign/Cloning_Label

FDA’s comment period ends May 3.

Support the Cloned Food Labeling Act in the House and Senate
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced last month that the agency will likely approve the sale of cloned foods this year. FDA’s action flies in the face of widespread scientific concern about the risks of food from clones, and ignores the animal cruelty and troubling ethical concerns that the cloning process brings. What’s worse, FDA indicates that it will not require labeling on cloned food, so consumers will have no way to avoid these experimental foods.

In response to FDA’s pending approval, US Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) has introduced Senate Bill S.414, the Cloned Food Labeling Act, and U.S. House Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced an identical bill, H.R. 992, in the House just a few weeks later.

What I really want to know is when they’re going to pass a bill requiring labeling for genetically-modified foods. There currently is no such requirement.

FYI: I’m tagging this under “resistance” because in this case even contacting a congress-person or senator can be legitimately construed as resistance – resistance to the corporate-government complex that would force these products upon us without a choice. It’s not often that we actually have an opportunity to fight against that.

But really… where’s the requirement for labeling GM food?

the Katrina of 2007?

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can read this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2007/03/07/the-katrina-of-2007/

a brief musing about FOX media

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can read this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2007/02/23/a-brief-musing-about-fox-media/

two quotes on American politics and economics

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can see this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2006/09/14/two-quotes-on-american-politics-and-economics/

Peak oil, alternative energy sources, infrastructure, and the future of America

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can find this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2006/09/14/peak-oil-alternative-energy-sources-infrastructure-and-the-future-of-america/

Food article and September 11

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can find this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2006/09/11/food-article/

Happy Labor Day (tomorrow)

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can find this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2006/09/03/happy-labor-day-tomorrow/