The Prodigal Sheep

Gay and Dissident Bishops Excluded From ’08 Meeting

The direction the Anglican communion is taking is saddening. Bishops whose appointment, actions or 'manner of life' are considered divisive or scandalous have been excluded from invitation to the 2008 Lambeth Conference. According to the NY Times,

The archbishop of Canterbury sent out more than 800 invitations yesterday to a once-a-decade global gathering of Anglican bishops. But he did not invite the openly gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire and the bishop in Virginia who heads a conservative cluster of disaffected American churches affiliated with the archbishop of Nigeria. 

Openly gay bishop Gene Robinson might be at the center of this firestorm, but he is not the one responsible for sowing division and scandal in the worldwide Anglican communion. The responsibility for that lies squarely at the feet of Nigerian Archbishop Akinola and others bent on constraining the historical openness and unity of the Anglican communion by a new form of puritanical fundamentalism.

Bishop Robinson said he was extremely disappointed at his exclusion and asked in a statement, “At a time when the Anglican Communion is calling for a ‘listening process’ on the issue of homosexuality, how does it make sense to exclude gay and lesbian people from the discussion?”

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, who has expressed liberal views on homosexuality in the past, has been determined to keep the communion intact. In his invitation letter, Archbishop Williams wrote, “I have to reserve the right to withhold or withdraw invitations from bishops whose appointment, actions or manner of life have caused exceptionally serious division or scandal within the communion.”

How sad that the opportunity to extend grace (to both Robinson and his fundamentalist detractors) has been squandered in favor of political expediency.

Thank God Rowan Williams' ability to extend invitations is limited to ecclesial gatherings. I wonder who would be invited or disinvited to the banquet table of Christ, if invitations were in such mortal hands? As far as I know, the only criteria to get onto that list is to be thirsty for the free gift of the water of life (Rev. 22:17).

I wonder who Jesus would discriminate against?

Posted by Mark Poole at 1:42 PM in Justice, MCC, Progressive Christianity, Queer
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Apocalypse now. Just in time for the holidays. Take your pick of the following:

• Mel Gibson's latest movie, where America's conquered are fodder for Gibson's latest historically inaccurate depiction of evil,
• Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a so-called 'Christian' video game where you engage in apocalyptic warfare and win points by converting or killing atheists, Catholics, Muslims and Jews, or
• This report on where Western civilization is heading under the enlightened ethical leadership of Chairman Bush and co.
  

Posted by Mark Poole at 2:23 PM in Justice, Politics, Religious Right
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Today's readings from the daily office include Revelation 17. This passage and chapter 18 describe the punishment and fall of mystical Babylon, the mother of abominations who rules over all the nations of the earth:

Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries. (17:1-2)

To the first or second century readers of Revelation, Babylon of course was imperial Rome. But what interests me more than a historical-critical interpretation of this imagery is the idea of the embodiment of idolatry. Babylon is incomparably wealthy, riding upon the beast of imperial military and political power, drenched in the blood of the innocent, with all the nations are under her spell.

What particularly potent imagery for what Walter Wink refers to as the Domination System — an idolatrous system of power and privilege based on imperial culture and the myth of redemptive violence. In The Powers That Be (which I started reading a few days ago), Wink interprets the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish as the archetypal narrative of the myth that social order and cohesion must be maintained and reinforced through repeated sacrificial violence.

The Romans were the first century inheritors, through the Pax Romana, of the myth of redemptive violence. The Domination System ruled through Roman imperial power and through its descendants in Christendom and later the modern nation state.

One does not have to look too far to see Babylon's modern sons, who continue to insist it is necessary to destroy entire societies through suffering and bloodshed in order to save them. These days however, redemptive violence is waged under euphemisms like 'structural adjustment', 'collateral damage' and 'staying the course'.

They will make war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers. (17:14)

The great promise of Revelation is that such oppression and violence will be overturned, ultimately and nonviolently, by the Lamb. Might is not right, and ultimately will not prevail.

Posted by Mark Poole at 3:49 PM in Justice, Politics, Theology
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I am not Episcopal, but I find the Episcopal daily office lectionary a wonderful resource for reading and meditating on scripture. Lowell Grisham's blog provides each day's readings together with his personal commentary. Lowell is an astute observer of religion and public life and I highly recommend his insights.

Yesterday's and today's Hebrew scripture readings are from Micah 1 and 2. The prophet Micah warns here of God's impending judgment upon the cities of Jerusalem and Samaria, the twin political and religious centers of ancient Judah and Israel. Like many modern centers of power both cities had become, in Micah's eyes, corrupted at the core through their political and religious 'prostitution' and their abuse of wealth and power.

He rails against powerful interests who snatch property from the poor and evict families from their homes, against political leaders who raise extortionate taxes on the poor whilst inflicting unnecessary wars upon their people.

As Lowell observes,

Much of the complaint of the prophets was directed at the abuse of power by the wealthy and the politically connected. The prophets accuse the powerful of using their power to expand their own economic interests, often at the expense of the peasants and smaller landowners. There was lying, arrogance and corruption in the high places, particularly the seat of government. God detests such behavior, says Micah and the prophets. Such behavior brings God's judgment.

This stuff reads like today's headlines. When you read the 8th century prophets it is like reading a contemporary newspaper or watching TV news -- just substitute Washington for Samaria and Jerusalem. The 8th century BCE was a time when Israel was wealthy and politically powerful. It was also a time of increasing economic contrasts. The wealthy were concentrating much of the wealth and power into the hands of the elite, a circumstance guaranteed to draw the ire of the prophetic tradition.

Lowell goes on to note that the prescription against such abuse is summed up in Micah's famous prophetic demans, that the Israelites learn again 'to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.'

Such an injunction is appropriate given the times we live in. We may not be facing fire and brimstone from heaven, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest a callousness in public and private life equivalent to that prophesied against by Micah.

Given that an election is looming in the US, the Christian Alliance for Progress is timely in releasing its Christian Voters Values Guide 2006, a welcome counterpoint to the almost deafening posturing on 'values' by the religious right.

On several key points, the Voters Values Guide echos the concerns of Micah:

• Forsaking brute power - seeking peace, not war
• Caring for the earth - responsible environmental stewardship
• Rejectig bigotry, embracing dignity - equality for all
  
• Extending healing to all - health care for all

Posted by Mark Poole at 11:52 PM in Justice, Politics, Progressive Christianity
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Every now and then I come across a rare gem from somewhere on the religious right that simply leaves me dumbfounded by its unintentional irony.

Hence the following surreal quote in the Washington Post from Pope Benedict XVI's biographer, George Weigel. Weigel is responding to outrage throughout the Muslim world following the pope's recent comments in which he quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor saying that the prophet Muhammad brought "only evil and inhuman" things to the world:

The over-the-top reaction in the Muslim world simply underscores the truth of what he [the pope] said at Regensburg, which is that unless Islam develops the capacity to be self-critical — unless Islamic leaders take responsibility for saying to their extremists that violence in the name of God is wrong — then there can be no genuine interreligious dialogue.

Such arrogance. A prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. Inquisition, anyone? Witch hunt? Gay seminarian purge?

I don't remember the last time I heard Vatican leadership exhibiting the capacity to be self-critical in relation to any number of its dogmatic pronouncements — especially those condemning family planning and contraceptive use in the third world, or on the "intrinsic moral evil" of loving, committed same-sex relationships. Nor have I witnessed Catholic leaders taking "responsibility for saying to their [own] extremists that violence in the name of God is wrong."

This laughable piece of deflection ties in nicely with a recent article on Christian realism in the Progressive Christians Uniting blog. In it, Peter Laarman highlights Reinhold Niebuhr's insight that

Christians should see the world as it is and act ethically in the light of a clear-sighted realism. For the neoconservatives and for most other Right ideologues, “realism” means understanding how bad they are — all the “enemies of freedom,” “Islamo-fascists,” etc.; yet surely a major part of Niebuhr’s realism entailed understanding our own propensity to sinning, our own capacity for self-deception and hubris. It’s this kind of Christian Realism that is in critically short supply right now.

Laarman ties this lack of self-critical capacity amongst Christians to "the corporate-media mystification bubble". This lack seems to be particularly pronounced (in his view) among American evangelical Christians.

Consumption is a lonely pursuit, but it’s a pursuit that accords perfectly with the high level of small-bore anxiety that rules our culture ...

Consumerism pits me against other consuming monads ... it definitely does not invite us to think collectively about how we will fare in retirement, maintain our health, or gain education for the enhancement of life itself rather than for purposes of workplace competition. This latter way of thinking — thinking about the “we” and doing so with the benefit of critical consciousness — is the business of citizenship, not consumerism ...

The paramount challenge facing progressive Christians, I believe, is developing the courage and the tools needed to puncture the mysification bubble — is finding the capacity open the eyes and awaken the consciences of our fellow Christians and of the body politic as a whole to the suffering and danger all around us.

Mel White has also attributed part of this mystification or blindness to the average church-goer's tendency toward blind faith in their spiritual and secular leaders. If their pastor, pope or president say Islam is an evil religion or homosexuals are destroying the family, then it must be so.

So we wrap ourselves in the mystification bubble while blaming others, not ourselves, for all the evil in the world. Meanwhile, Rome is burning. 

Posted by Mark Poole at 2:24 PM in Justice, Politics, Religious Right
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Terror Suspects Not Guilty, Wife Says

In the second such incident in three days, three young men of Arab descent have been arrested in Michigan on terrorist charges. They were stopped after purchasing 80 pre-paid cell-phones from a Wal-Mart, and found to have 1,000 of them in their minivan. The men were charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes.

In both cases the defendants claimed they had purchased the phones at various stores in order to resell them elsewhere for a profit.

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Abdelhamied Othman told the magistrate. He said authorities had previously stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

"We've been checked by the FBI before," he said. "They even gave us their card and everything."

Authorities won't say exactly what the men were planning to do with the phones, or why possession of too many cell-phones is sufficient grounds to make an arrest. But county officials claim that cell-phones can be used as detonators for explosives and that the men arrested Saturday were perhaps planning to blow up a local bridge. Yet the news stories don't report any discovery of explosives, bomb making materials or other terrorist paraphernalia.

OK... so if these guys are terrorists, why are they planning to blow up a bridge nobody heard of? Why does Wal-Mart sell untraceable prepaid phones in large volumes in the first place? How many phones can you legally purchase before being accused of terrorist plotting? How many detonators would you need to blow up a bridge? Why would you keep them in your minivan? Where are all the explosives?

What disturbs me is that people can be arrested and detained in this country nowadays without committing a crime and without there being any shred of evidence that a crime has been committed or planned. All you need to do is be or look Arab and do something the authorities consider suspicious.

Is it just possible that the only common sense reason someone would purchase 1,000 phones is to resell them for a profit, just as the defendants claim? Perhaps these men are terrorists after all. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that so many dire terrorist plots by unconnected terror cells have been foiled on both sides of the Atlantic in the past week. Or perhaps we are simply descending to a new level of madness in this country. After all, there are elections in November.

Posted by Mark Poole at 8:49 PM in Justice, Politics
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Vital lesson in Holocaust memories

Australian High Court justice Michael Kirby is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald in a speech promoting the launch of Heirloom, a new anthology of Holocaust survivor memories:

Justice Kirby said an early lesson is that "every diminution of freedom takes us in a wrong direction.

"Every act of discrimination by our Parliament and governments dishonours our nation. We honour the memories recorded in this book most worthily when we resolve to respect the freedoms and dignity of all people and to be vigilant for our own."

Understanding the lesson began with appreciating the stealth of the Holocaust, which had not appeared overnight. "It all happened gradually. It crept up insidiously."

There were laws, followed by yellow stars and banishment to the back of the tram. Step by step came exclusion from public transport, closure of businesses, consignment to the ghetto, the beatings and cries of Jews out!, the selective deportations and the "final solution".

He was undoubtedly referring to the conservative Australian government's treatment of religious minorities and unjust incarceration of middle eastern refugees. The lesson here is not lost. Smaller injustices left unchallenged lead inevitiably to larger ones down the line, as society becomes increasingly innoculated to what is going on.

As Kirby points out, the middle classes of Nazi Germany who allowed the holocaust to happen with nary a protest were mostly good people with 'family values'. They "returned to their homes and children at night, attended meticulously to their hygiene and settled down to listen to beloved recordings of Schubert and Beethoven that made them cry."

Tip of the hat to Jeffrey at Mahler's Prodigal Son.

Posted by Mark Poole at 2:11 PM in Australia, Justice
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Yet more revelations of bureaucratic incompetence in the Department of Homeland Stupidity.

There are 500 children still unaccounted for after Hurricane Katrina, but the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is having trouble locating them because FEMA won't share its evacuee database with them, citing privacy laws. Even the FBI had trouble getting access to the necessary information until the Justice Department stepped in earlier this month.

In recent days, FEMA has released data that helped close 15 cases. Yesterday, after inquiries from The Washington Post, the agency sent the FBI a computer disk with the names of 570,000 evacuees.

But as the four-month anniversary of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history approaches, congressional leaders, law enforcement authorities and family advocates say FEMA's slow response has meant that many families that could have been reunited this holiday season instead remain apart.

Wait a minute... the Department of Homeland security won't share information because it doesn't want to infringe privacy laws? This coming from a federal bureaucracy in an environment where it's apparently OK for the president to authorize illegal eavesdropping on domestic telephone calls and e-mail in the national interest, privacy considerations be damned.

Continue reading "How FEMA stole Christmas" »

Posted by Mark Poole at 10:52 AM in Justice
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Christmas, once again, is the time for tax cuts to the rich and good-will to all manner of private sector interests. Congress moves to adopt a budget that would cut $50 billion in funding for programs for people in need, including Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start. Meanwhile, public money is being given away in the form of $60 billion in tax cuts to the rich, as well as the usual round of pork barrel funding (for projects like Alaska's 'bridge to no-where' and digital TV set-top box conversions).

Here we see in stark contrast the neo-conservative agenda to progressively dismantle government services and redistribute the nation's wealth to powerful business interests and the mega-rich. Thus it comes as little surprise to learn that the world's wealthiest nation has made no progress in improving adult literacy over the past decade. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, since 1992 adult literacy in this country has remained flat or dropped across every level of education. "So even as more people get a formal education, the literacy rate is not rising. Federal officials say this trend is puzzling and worthy of research."

Continue reading "'Tis the season for giving" »

Posted by Mark Poole at 3:33 PM in Justice, Progressive Christianity, Religious Right
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Promising news from the Washington Post this holiday season:

President Bush reversed position yesterday and endorsed a torture ban crafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) after months of White House attempts to weaken the measure, which would prohibit the "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody anywhere in the world.

McCain's bill was influenced in part by the testimony of Captain Ian Fishback, 26 year old West Point Graduate and officer with the 82nd Airborne Division.

Fishback relinquished anonymity in order to stand up against what he believed was deeply immoral, even though he understood that the violations of the Geneva Convention that were going on were not isolated instances but in response to instructions from the officer-corps and 'probably in combination with the executive branch of government.'

In an interview published in the September Human Rights Watch report, Fishback said:

Congress should have oversight of treatment of prisoners. That is the way; the Army should not take it upon itself to determine what is acceptable for America to do in regards to treatment of prisoners. That’s a value… that’s more than just a military decision, that’s a values decision, and therefore Congress needs to know about it, and therefore the American people need to have an honest representation of what’s going on presented to them so that they can have a say in that ...

If America holds something as the moral standard, it should be unacceptable for us as a people to change that moral standard based on fear. The measure of a person or a people’s character is not what they do when everything is comfortable. It’s what they do in an extremely trying and difficult situation, and if we want to claim that these are our ideals and our values then we need to hold to them no matter how dark the situation.

Posted by Mark Poole at 9:34 AM in Justice, Politics
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Today's Washington Post ran this excellent opinion piece on the cruel, inhumane and degrading interrogation techniques used by the US government against detainees, and their relationship to torture as defined by US and international law: Torture, American-Style. The article does a good job of deconstructing the Bush administration's doublethink and doublespeak, concluding that:

Shamefully, it is a system that permits cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, smudges long-standing lines about what is and is not permitted in routine interrogations -- and then expresses hypocritical horror when soldiers and interrogators cross the blurry line into torture and murder.

As a Christian, one must ask inevitably what Jesus, no stranger himself to the experience of torture at the hands of an imperial power, would make of this. How can a government which calls itself 'Christian' fail to heed the example and words of Christ himself? Who would Jesus torture?

Posted by Mark Poole at 11:00 PM in Justice, Progressive Christianity
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As fall came to a close, I noticed our neighbors next door didn't bother bagging their leaves. They just blew them out onto the street for the city to clean up. Reminds me of this story about US greenhouse emissions:

Mr Connaughton hailed the “stabilisation” of greenhouse gas output as a victory for the US policy of avoiding mandatory targets and concentrating on new technologies, such as methane capture and “clean coal”.

The reason emissions have 'stabilized' in the US is the large scale offshoring of the manufacturing, chemical and fertilizer industries to locations like China and India. The hubris of empire - 'outsource' the costs, and what can't be outsourced, simply transfer to the next generation.

Posted by Mark Poole at 10:52 AM in Justice
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