"Imagine a world filled with holy listeners." - Joan Chittister

[via grrrlmeetsworld]

From a yahoo benzodiazepine withdrawal/recovery message board:

We all have shortcomings. Mine are no better than yours, hers are no more special than mine...etc. If you are not actively wronging someone, then they have no right to make you feel that you are somehow lacking. A first grader is not lacking in twelfth grade skills. Only a twelfth grader can be held accountable for those things. I am not responsible for something I am not equipped to accommodate. I will find a way to do it when I get to it. I am not a rocket scientist. I am not launching a thing into space.

[quoted at Been There...Still There]

[via hitnatzrut]

Newsflash: Etymology is so often used as alchemy, it isn't magic... even in Hebrew.

A ceasefire is just a lasting peace that underacheives.

Intended Resolution

[quoted at Sean the Baptist]

If it is possible to interpret, then it is also possible to misinterpret; and to claim that misinterpretation has taken place is to engage in the practice of interpretative disagreement. In itself, disagreement is an ethically neutral act. It does not necessarily imply that one party is doing violence to the other, that a human right to freedom of speech is under attack, or that there has been a failure to understand the other's point of view. The ethical risks that accompany disagreement are perhaps no greater than those attending other practices, such as the avoidance of conflict. Disagreement is always an act rather than just an occurrence, and those who engage in it do so on the basis of means and ends they regard as appropriate and rational. Most important of all, disagreement presupposes a shared concern and thus an acknowledgment of community rather than a retreat into isolation. It always intends its own resolution, even if this can only be attained in the form of a negotiated compromise or an agreement to differ.{emphasis mine}

--Francis A. Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London/New York: T & T Clark International 2004), 24-25

When In Roma...

The Gypsies, who now prefer to be called Roma, are the new Jews of Eastern Europe. The Roma unfortunately appear to have all of the disadvantages of the Jews without any of their advantages. While the Jewish Question has largely been "solved" due to the mass murder of the Holocaust and mass emigration of the survivors, the Roma remain a large, stateless, and often persecuted people throughout the region.

Ethnic Romanians are not always thrilled about the group name change because Roma sounds like, well, Romanian. The Roma form a sizeable minority of Romania's population but no one quite knows how many Roma there are--estimates range from 500,000 to 2 million out of Romania's 22 million people. Slavery of the Roma persisted in Romania until the mid-nineteenth century. Many Roma were also murdered during the Holocaust....

Prejudice toward Roma often bears a striking resemblance to anti-Semitism where Jews become the symbol of the Other and are blamed for all of the world's problems. Just as Jews were often blamed simultaneously for capitalism and communism, Roma today are often attacked as wealthier than other people due to mafia-style activity and as dirty, poor people in the next breath....

The problems appear so huge and difficult to solve that it makes America's racial problems appear almost trivial in comparison. At least American blacks and whites share a largely common culture. As Professor Henry Louis Gates provocatively likes to point out, African Americans have far more in common culturally with David Duke than with most people in Black Africa.

[via The Gadflyer]

Plentiful Irony

Look at the symbiotic model in nature - the delicate balance between predator, prey, and population. It is a common enough belief that a population never expands beyond its food supply's ability to sustain them. If they did, they would starve and die off. Yet look at humanity - the only organism on the planet that exists in such a state of overpopulation. And we will go on overpopulating because we place no limits on ourselves. We are producing food for a population many times our current size. And millions are starving. Yet our first solution is "produce more food" rather than population control. We are living outside of the order that every other creature on the planet has lived under since the beginning, and we're suffering for it.

[via This Great Arument]

And in the comments to that post:

It really isn't so much a matter of whether or not we are willing to follow the planet's rules. We can't "give up dominion." We've never had it. Not completely. The earth is much bigger, and much more devastating than us. It can live without us. We can't live without it. One way or the other, the planet will win. Whether or not we also win depends on whether we are on the same team with the planet. Otherwise at the very least, we will all lose.

--Wanderer

True Modesty

What if every possible affirmation that can be made of God, even by the so-called religions of revelation, falls so far short of the truth of God as to be false? Who is the atheist then? The glib God-talk that infuses public discourse in contemporary America descends from an anthropomorphic habit of mind, dating to the Bible and beyond, that treats God like an intimate friend or well-known enemy, depending on the weather and the outcome of battles. But there is another strain in the Biblical tradition that insists on the radical otherness of God, an otherness so complete that even the use of the word ‘’God” as a name for this Other One is forbidden. According to this understanding, God is God precisely in escaping and transcending comprehension by human beings. This can seem to mean that God is simply unknowable. If so, humans are better off not bothering about it. Atheism, agnosticism, or childish anthropomorphism — all the same.

But here is where it gets tricky. What if God’s unknowability is the most illuminating profundity humans can know about God? That would mean that religious language, instead of opening into the absolute certitude on which all forms of triumphal superiority are based, would open into true modesty. The closed creation, in which every question has an answer, would be replaced by an infinite cosmos where every answer sparks a new question. If what we mean by ‘’God” is the living pulse of such open-endedness, then God is of no use in systems of dominance, censorship, power. God is everywhere, yes. But, also, God is nowhere. And that, too, shows in America, especially in its fake religiosity.

--James Carroll, quoted at living theology

The Shocking Truth

1 In late July, the Metro Chicago Synod heard that Jesus was attracting more first-time visitors and baptizing more adults than any other ELCA pastor in the city, 2 although in fact it was not really Jesus who had baptized them, but his irregularly-commisioned staff of unordained lay ministers. 3 Now when Jesus learned of this, he left the seminary community in Hyde Park and went back once more toward the ELCA headquarters on Higgins Road.

4 Now to get there, he had to go through an area just north of downtown called Boystown. 5 So he came to a part of Boystown called Northhalsted, not far from the plot of ground where Emperor Mayor Daley had ordained that the Chicago Cubs should play baseball. 6 Cub's Stadium was near there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey on the Red Line, sat down at a sidewalk café table outside the bar called Hydrate. It was just about lunch-time, and though the rainbow flags were fluttering in the breeze and the music inside the bar was pumping, there weren't many people around (because it's often hot and miserable outside, at mid-day in late July, in Chicago).

7 A waiter came to the table, wearing a bright pink "His+His" t-shirt and a "Silence=Death" armband, and raised one eyebrow at the man seated at the table in front of him in the "Come Follow Me" t-shirt. Jesus said to him, "Will you give me a drink?" 8 (All the lay ministers had gone down the street to pick up Subway sandwiches for the rest of the journey.)

9 The gay man said to him, "Hey...you tell me. After all, you appear to be a straight Christian, and I'm a gay man. Let's face it - we don't get many religious folks in Boystown, let alone places like this. And I'm not only a gay man, but I'm a Muslim gay man. So where does a guy like you get off asking someone like me for a drink?" (For Christians do not associate with gays, nor with Muslims if they can help it.) {Intrigued? Read More}

[via Ragamuffin Ramblings, HT: dissonant bible]

Being, Not Doing

And here’s what really trips me up: I’m not convinced you can clearly define good anyway. Snap shots can make good and bad appear simplistically separate, simplistically clear, but really, aren’t the two more often mixed up? Sometimes it’s the most awful things, the most ugly or evil or extraordinarily pathetic, that lead to positive action. Don’t they? Like figuring out tough class or race-related things in Katrina’s aftermath. Like wounded people turning into healers. Some of history’s biggest embarrassments have been the reason why myriad smaller tragedies haven’t happened, or have actually gotten cared about.

And sometimes it’s the most well-intentioned things ever – the ones dreamed up by people doggedly committed to making the world a better place – that really, really screw things up. Think manifest destiny. Think over-protective parenting. Think any number of technological “advances,” and the Hiroshimas and global warmings and massive oil spills pluming in their wakes.

So. What does it mean for me to “try to do good”? What do I presuppose in even asking such a question?

While I won’t try answering that, I will give my conclusion. You ready?

I know that “good” and “bad” are difficult to separate sometimes, and that the “good” I try to do may actually harm someone, or mess up something better. But I’m thinking that’s par for this messy life-course. And I’m certainly not excited about doing nothing because I convince myself that no matter what I do (or don't do, as the case may be) is part of life’s yin and yang.

So my conclusion? I want to try to do good in the world because that’s what I like to do. I like it. It makes me hopeful. I like it better than doing nothing, and I like it better than knowingly doing bad. And heck if I understand my complex mix of motives better than that.

[via [un]Veilings]