Big Things, Little People

Rosa Parks is just the kind of saint for which All Saints’ Day was meant.

She never healed anybody or resuscitated a corpse. She never got the stigmata, or turned water into wine or talked to animals. She never got crucified or stoned. She never saw crosses in the sky to conquer by, or made parched ground blossom into roses.

She just sat in her seat. She was just faithful to the idea that all people are created equal. In that faithfulness, she brought a nation to penance. A little black woman, crowned now a secular saint, but a saint nonetheless. Her act gives us all courage to do all the little things, which added together make a Big Thing: an authentic life.

[via Sacraments Wholesale]

"Leave us not to ourselves..."

[via Unedited Ravings]

The stuff of life
Overshadowing
The stuff of self...
Such drives ugly
And forgotten things
Out from dark corners.

All truth illumines;
Though,
If not wed with love,
It is unnatural
And murderous.
{read the rest}

Disabled Democracy

From From a Different Viewpoint:

People off all incomes should have equal access to government documents. And the law isn't nearly as clear in this respect as it is with respect to disability (although it can still be argued well). Not everyone is going to be interested in every report but it should be available to everyone. The government should not be looking to get a profit off reports. And even if they are just recouping costs, well they shouldn't be doing it at the expense of democratic participation. Taxes should be covering government documents so that everyone has access and it isn't limited to those that have enough money to buy them. Not everyone was interested in reports in the past or is now. But you could get a copy if you were interested by getting in contact with your MP. $50 is a lot of money to a person on disability and it is even more to a person on social assistance. And these are the people least likely to have a computer and internet connexion. It's an issue that doesn't get any real attention but is important. If you want to have a real functioning democracy it needs to be accessible.

Minority Politics

I put down the phone and I thought to myself, “How old am I?” When I was a young pastor, it was always we liberal, mainline pastors who were told, “Boy, you need to stick to saving souls and stay out of politics.” Now, the roles have switched. It’s mainly conservative, evangelical Christians who are more strongly mixing religion and politics. My, how things have changed.

Of course, mixing religion with politics is as old as our republic, and it remains one of the most distinctive aspects of American democracy....Americans have always mixed religion with politics.

And yet, this is not an easy mix, for reasons having to do with the nature of our politics and the nature of our religion....

For instance, a friend of mine is an Islamic scholar. He casually remarked one day that the Koran, the Holy Book of Muslims, has absolutely no instructions for how Muslims are to behave when they find themselves a minority, in a majority non-Muslim culture. If they find themselves in such a situation, they are to change the culture into a God fearing, (that is Islamic) culture.

Of course, you knew what I was thinking when he said this. I realized that in our Christian scriptures we have absolutely no instruction for how to behave when you have power, when you are in charge of things, when you are President of a bank or a Mayor of a town. All of our New Testament is distinctly minority literature, the literature of the powerless and the marginalized.

Jesus gave us a great deal of instruction on what to do after a divorce or what to do when someone slaps us on the right cheek, but no instruction on how to run a government. Jesus Christ was crucified by the greatest government the world had ever known, with the most noble system of laws that the world had ever known. Rome. That ought to teach us Christians to be very wary and suspicious when we encounter governments and their laws, even if they presume to be democratic.

In conversation with Jerry Falwell a number of years ago, I told Mr. Falwell that my main objection to him was that he acted like a “Methodist from the 1950’s.” I reminded him that it was liberal mainline Christians like me who said in the 1950’s, “Oh, if we can just get an invitation to the White House. Oh, if we could just get a few more Senators elected who have Christian principles in their souls. Then we will no problem between us and politicians.”

It has been years since I’ve heard Methodists talk like that. Now the only people talking like that are the people who follow Jerry Falwell.{read the whole thing}

[via A Peculiar Prophet, HT: View From the Basement]

Not Courting Evangelicals

One of the historical oddities of George W. Bush's decision to nominate Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court is that if confirmed, he will establish a majority on the court of Roman Catholics. This fact hasn't gotten a lot of comment so far, in part because it is and should be irrelevant to his qualifications, and in part because hardly anyone noticed that Clarence Thomas reverted to his Catholic upbringing in recent years, joining Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Chief Justice Roberts as Catholic members of SCOTUS.

Given the brief but intense campaign by some conservative evangelicals to tout Alito's unsuccessful predecessor, Harriet Miers, as establishing an "evangelical seat" on the Court, you have to wonder how they privately feel about yet another Catholic nomination....

None of this, of course, means politicized conservative evangelicals wouldn't be happy with a Justice like Alito, who on the key constitutional issues they care about, has nearly perfect views. But beneath the surface, you do have to wonder what they think about the heavy representation of their ancient enemy, as contrasted with their own invisibility, on an institution that they regard as one of the commanding heights of American society.

[via NewDonkey.com, HT: Jesus Politics]

Happy Trails...To You, Maybe!

Look up some old trailers, like Friday the 13th -Pt. 8 -Jason Takes Manhattan or Ghostbusters 1, and you'll see what I mean. Wow! Back then, they never even got CLOSE to spoiling a movie with the trailer. Nowadays, you still get that SOMETIMES. Mostly, you get enough in most trailers, you don't even have to put down that 7 or 8 bucks to see it, you just gotta go on cheap night and see another movie. One-liners, cheap shots (usually at some poor dude's crotch), and enough of whatever techno/hip hop/rock soundtrack the film makers have cooked up to sell to the public. I mean, old school trailers had class and made you want to plunk down that hard earned cash for the ticket and popcorn.

[via Phreakin' A]

Futile Fights?

When Liberal Christians go bad: "We cannot prevail in this struggle if we resort to the tactics of the haters."

When Conservative Christians go bad: "What's the threat again?....Sigh. I can't say I'm surprised by this."

[examples via Mainline Protestant]

Nowdays when someone says, "I love you," what they really mean is, "I feel sentiment toward you." So why not just say that? You feel a connection? Great! Say that.

To me, the word "love" could be replaced by "cooperate with." If I love God, I want to cooperate with God, not sit on my ass praying up a bunch of sentiment. If I love my brothers and sisters, I want to cooperate with them in their lives and plans instead of passively saying how much I care for them. If I love my enemies, I may not feel so well toward them, but I will cooperate enough in their lives as to understand them better, and to learn that they are not all bad. Cooperation can be as little as listening sometimes. But this is the real kind of listening, not the "uh huh" listening we all like to do to one other.

[via Been There...Still There]

Systemic Health

The good news about the avian flu is that while researchers have found that it resembles the "Spanish Flu" that killed between 50-100 million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919, it's also responsive to today's anti-virals, which didn't exist back in the day.

Hopefully the next pandemic influenza strain will be at least partially responsive to existing flu vaccines. They'll be available disproportionately in the wealthy states of the developed world. When enough people within a community get vaccinated it elevates what's known as the population's "herd immunity" and makes disease transmission slower and easier to contain.

The rest of the story is bad news. The 1918 pandemic left many of the elderly and the infirm alive and wiped out young, vigorous, healthy people. The pandemic of 1830-32 is believed to have been just as severe, but there were fewer people in the world. We dodged bullets in 1957 and 1968, with pandemics that brought far fewer fatalities.

Every year between 10-15 times as many Americans die from the flu as perished on 9/11....

If we have a pandemic this winter or the next – a virulent and deadly one – our healthcare system will shut down fast enough to make your head spin.

[via The Gadflyer]

You Were Expecting...A Moderate?

Where do you begin with the ghosts in the stories about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito Jr.? It is hard to cover the territory, even if you limit yourself to The Washington Post. Let’s try to tiptoe through the minefield. But let me warn you right up front: I remain convinced that the key to this whole story is the old question, “Who gets to control the word ‘moderate?’”

This is a variation on the question I keep asking: If liberals are in favor of the status quo, which used to be called “abortion on demand,” and conservatives support a complete ban on legal abortion, what do the “moderates” want?

Of course, we already know the MSM answer to these questions. Moderates want to maintain the legal status quo and so do liberals. Thus, there are no real liberals.{read more}

[via GetReligion, emphasis mine]