blake.huggins

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American democracy is not my idol

I speak as a Christian- one whose commitment to democracy is very deep but whose Christian convictions are deeper. Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian believers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian- a follower of Jesus Christ- is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love that embraces socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope.

If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite Romans and subjugated Jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage- who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries.

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire.

— Cornel West

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Indifference more deadly than hate

[W]ithin a large-scale setting, where the other lives at a distance, indifference can be more deadly than hate.  Whereas the fire of hatred flares up in the proximity of the other and then dies down, the cold indifference can be sustained over time, especially in contemporary socieites.  A “system” — a political, economic, or cultural system — insinuates itself between myself and the other.  If the other is excluded, it is the system that is doing the excluding, a system in which I participate because I must survive and against which I do not rebel because it cannot be changed.  I turn my eyes away (or I zoom in with a camera at some exotic exemplar of suffering, which amounts to turning the eyes away because it both satisfies my perverse desire to see suffering and appeases my conscience for having turned the heart away from the sufferer).  I go about my own business.  Numbed by the apparent ineluctability of exclusion taking place outside my will though with my colloboration, I start to view horror and my implication in it as normalcy.  I reason: the road from Jersusalem to Jericho will always be littered by people beaten and left half-dead; I can pass — must pass — by each without much concern.  The indifference that made the prophect, takes care also of its fulfillment.

— Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, pg. 77

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MatterCon Recap 3: Peter Rollins, “From Theo-logos to Theo-poetics” http://j.mp/1rdZj5

had the worst leg cramp of my life earlier today. literally brought me to the floor. my calf muscle hates me.

RT @trippfuller @nieuprovoker: is Losing his Historical Jesus! Are you? http://retwt.me/hiik // yup, already did. it felt good. #fb