We must not now fool ourselves into excessive anger with our words and we cannot let the bluster of others fool us into expressing hatred for each other. Perhaps we should fear our words rather than fearing our neighbors. Robert Leo Heilman, “Of Tyrants and Tyranny”
Source: Q&A: Oregon Writer Robert Leo Heilman on the Power of Language – The Daily Yonder
God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all, without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him. If he is not the savior of all, the Kingdom is only a dream, and creation something considerably worse than a nightmare. But, again, it is not so. According to scripture, God saw that what he created was good. If so, then all creatures must, in the ages, see it as well.
David Bentley Hart,
That All Shall Be Saved
Within a week, hard-line conservatives within the S.B.C. seized upon the resolution and cast it as a threat from the left.
Source: The Fight for the Heart of the Southern Baptist Convention | The New Yorker
Lurking in this idea of “civic knowledge” is a mandate to consider only land-owning whites as constituting “the American experiment”.
Source: Inside the Attacks on Critical Race Theory – CounterPunch.org
For over a century, one of the most important salmon runs in the United States has had to contend with historic dams – and now four of them are set to be taken down.
On my own, I don’t know how to believe that I am a child or heir of God. It is being together in our wholeness, with the entire body of Christ, that makes it somehow easier to believe that we are beautiful. We each have our own little part of the beauty, our own gifts of the Spirit, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 12. Paul says that the particular way “the Spirit is given to each person is for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). Paul’s word for this is a “charism”—a gift that is given to each person not just for themselves, but to build up the community and even society. Since we don’t have the full responsibility of putting it all together as individuals, we can shed the false theology of perfectionism. All we have to do is discover our own gift, even if it is just one thing, and use it for the good of all.
With the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that argument increasingly fed the idea that Black and Brown people were lazy and wanted to receive government handouts rather than work. Businessmen and social traditionalists eager to get rid of the popular New Deal government told voters that government programs to help ordinary Americans were “socialism,” redistributing money from hardworking white people to lazy people of color. They talked of “makers” and “takers.”To purge the nation of socialism, then, and return it to the pre–New Deal government, they set out to limit voting. In 1980, Paul Weyrich, the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation that has designed much of the legislation currently being passed in Republican-dominated states, said “I don’t want everybody to vote….our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
As several reports noted, however, even though the appeals court panel was unanimous, Judge James Ho “issued a reluctant concurring opinion expressing misgivings about the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence,” The New York Times’ Adam Liptak explained. Judge Ho wrote, “Nothing in the text or original understanding of the Constitution establishes a right to an abortion,” adding, “Rather, what distinguishes abortion from other matters of health care policy in America — and uniquely removes abortion policy from the democratic process established by our Founders — is Supreme Court precedent.” Judge Ho went on to write that he was “deeply troubled by how the district court [Judge Reeves] handled this case. The opinion issued by the district court displays an alarming disrespect for the millions of Americans who believe that babies deserve legal protection during pregnancy as well as after birth, and that abortion is the immoral, tragic, and violent taking of innocent human life.”
St. John One: One 