“The will to power and of possession has become limitless.”

The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away. We have begun a throw away culture. This tendency is seen on the level of individuals and whole societies; and it is being promoted! In circumstances like these, solidarity, which is the treasure of the poor, is often considered counterproductive, opposed to the logic of finance and the economy. While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. A new, invisible and at times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules. Moreover, indebtedness and credit distance countries from their real economy and citizens from their real buying power. Added to this, as if it were needed, is widespread corruption and selfish fiscal evasion which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The will to power and of possession has become limitless.

-Pope Francis speaking to ambassadors to the Vatican, May 16.

“Religious indulgences have staged a comeback…”

It remains fascinating that in the age of televangelism and the megachurch movement, the Catholic church has ceded ground to the prosperity preachers who offer wealth  health, success  and instant miracles for cash fist and last. Religious indulgences have staged a comeback, apparently, only this time not in the Catholic church.  Religion as a market franchise. will take on cargo of any and all dimensions – other than that of the crown of thorns.

-Lamin Sanneh, Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African (2012).

“…Chrapitalism: the lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism…”

Don’t expect any breadth or grandeur from the Empire’s Christian divines. Across the board, the imperial chaplains exhibit the most obsequious deference to the Plutocracy, providing imprimaturs and singing hallelujahs for the civil religion of Chrapitalism: the lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism, America’s most enduring covenant theology. It’s the core of “American exceptionalism,” the sanctimonious and blood-spattered myth of providential anointment for global dominion. In the Chrapitalist gospel, the rich young man goes away richer, for God and Mammon have pooled their capital, formed a bi-theistic investment group, and laundered the money in baptismal fonts before parking it in offshore accounts. Chrapitalism has been America’s distinctive and gilded contribution to religion and theology, a delusion that beloved community can be built on the foundations of capitalist property. As the American Empire wanes, so will its established religion; the erosion of Chrapitalism will generate a moral and spiritual maelstrom.

What will American Christians do as their fraudulent Mandate from Heaven expires? They might break with the imperial cult so completely that it would feel like atheism and treason. With a little help from anarchists, they might be monotheists, even Christians again. Who better to instruct them in blasphemy than sworn enemies of both God and the state? Christians might discover that unbelievers can be the most incisive and demanding theologians.

-Eugene McCarraher, “Love is Stronger than Debt” in Books and Culture.

Another example of why Books and Culture continues to be my most anticipated mail. You’re a subscriber, right?

“…the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man.”

How many loves fail because, in an unconscious effort to make our weaknesses more strong, we link with others precisely at those points? How many women who are not mothers spend years mothering some mysteriously wounded man? How many apparently strong and successful men seek out love like a kind of topical balm they can apply to their wounded bodies and egos when they have withdrawn from combat? Herein lies the great differences between divine weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ’s weakness equals a supernatural strength.

-Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (2013).

You’ll have to forgive me if I quote from this small book multiple times as I make my way slowly through it.  Wiman’s observations – and the words he employs to make them – are the sort that beg to be shared.

“…the charge which I make against the Anglo American pulpit today…”

Rev. Francis J. Grimke

Another discouraging circumstance is to be found in the fact that the pulpits of the land are silent on these great wrongs. The ministers fear to offend those to whom they minister. We hear a great deal from their pulpits about suppressing the liquor traffic, about gambling, about Sabbath desecration, and about the suffering Armenians, and about polygamy in Utah when that question was up, and the Louisiana lottery. They are eloquent in their appeals to wipe out these great wrongs, but when it comes to Southern brutality, to the killing of Negroes and despoiling them of their civil and political rights, they are, to borrow an expression from Isaiah, “dumb dogs that cannot bark.”  Had the pulpit done its duty, the Southern savages, who have been sinking lower and lower during these years in barbarism, would by this time have become somewhat civilized, and the poor Negro, instead of being hunted down like a wild beast, terrorized by a pack of brutes, would be living amicably by the side of his white fellow citizen, if not in the full enjoyment of all his rights, with a fair prospect, at least of having them all recognized.

This is the charge which I make against the Anglo American pulpit today; its silence has been interpreted as an approval of these horrible outrages. Bad men have been encouraged to continue in their acts of lawlessness and brutality.  As long as the pulpits are silent on these wrongs it is in vain to expect the people to do any better than they are doing.

-Sermon by Rev. Francis J. Grimke, “The Negro Will Never Acquiesce As Long As He Lives”, on November 20, 1898.

Rev. Grimke is a new figure to me.  I came across him by tracking down a footnote in the fantastic biography of Ida B. Wells I’m reading.  On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day I’m thinking about those like Grimke and Wells who, during the years of reconstruction and Jim Crow, laid much of the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement that came decades after their deaths.  These were leaders who, like Dr. King, drew deeply from their Christian faith to challenge the dehumanizing systems during their lifetimes.