Reading notes

I’ve tried to convey this well, again and again here over the years (for example), but nobody conveys Jesus’ point of view (as revealed in scripture) better than OPOL does today, imagining what Jesus is saying at this very moment.

What ever made any of you think I was a rightwinger or would endorse or approve of anything the rightwingers do, say, or believe? …

I am not an advocate of war … not even the ‘good’ ones. If you folks would follow my most basic teachings, there’d never be another one. …

Somehow I feel like you guys are not paying attention. Despite my legion of ‘followers’ around the world, an estimated one billion people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition. About 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes. Three-fourths of the deaths are children under the age of five. While little children are starving in droves, you morons are blowing each other up with rockets and bombs!

The comment topics are worthy continuations on the theme, revealing (for example, on cheap grace) and bearing deep truths (for example, Bono’s quote that “God dwells in cardboard boxes”).

Thanks, OPOL and commenters.

I’m just now reading PastorDan’s sermon from YearlyKos in Las Vegas earlier this month. Yes:

Progressive faith shares with progressive politics, secular or not, the conviction that a shared life, lived with compassion, justice, moderation, responsibility, and tolerance is more than just a good life. It is the good life. …

The core of our work, whether religious or secular, whether Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Pagan, Unitarian …Universalist, or really not much of anything, is not the same world reversed, with ourselves on top and our opponents cast down. It is a world transformed. …

I encourage reading the whole thing. This is so how I would preach if I could preach. As my Quaker friends say, I say of Pastor Dan, “Friend speaks for me.”

This last sentence chills me:

The case Gore makes is worthy of sleepless nights: Our Earth is in extremis. It’s not just that polar bears are drowning because they cannot reach receding ice flows or that “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” will exist someday only as a Hemingway short story — we can all live with that. It’s rather that Hurricane Katrina is not past but prologue.

Then Cohen writes on what matters to me most. Yes, I’m deeply disturbed by the spiritual killing and maiming rendered by BushCo these past 5+ years as they and their supporters misrepresent the Prince of Peace as Lord of War, as the dragons that inhabit them seek to subvert the Church that was designed to stand against them. But truth is, Cohen here pinpoints what has offended and pissed me off the most:

But it is the thought that matters — the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma. [His insistence on abstinence as preferred birth control] is similar to Bush’s initial approach to global warming and his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol — ideology trumping science.

I want smart leaders whose fruit comes not from a corrupt tree.

If this is as true as Jim Wallis thinks, it’s one of the more encouraging things I’ve seen in a long time: that people called evangelical Christians are stopping behaving as those Jesus says “Woe unto” in the gospels and starting behaving as people intent on following Jesus’ example, caring about things he cares about.

Teaser from column: Rich Cizik, National Association of Evangelicals VP for Government Affairs, as quoted in NYT:

“I don’t think God is going to ask us how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created.”

Why, that’s actually sane.

Thinking, compassion, integrity coming back into evangelical Christianity? I sheepishly admit that even though I remember to ask for it from time to time, I had almost stopped believing it could happen.

When a dialogue begins about the extent of moral values issues and what biblically-faithful Christians should care about, the Religious Right begins to lose. The best news of all for the American church and society is this: The monologue of the Religious Right is over, and a new dialogue has just begun.

Yes! Only with thoughtful and informed dialogue can we move forward.

This would be such an about-face from the attitude I keep encountering, encapsulated in a sign I saw posted in a conservative Christian’s office, “I’m a radical Christian, which means I love Jesus more than you do” (only very slightly paraphrased). For me, that’s a hell of a dialogue-stopper. (“Uh, where does Luke 18:9-14 fit in?” I want to ask, but haven’t.)

Do let’s talk, and work together. That’d be so much better.

2007-04-25 update: Way opened for me to bring Luke 18:9-14 to the person’s attention. A few minutes later, the sign came down. Spirit moving, moves me.