Tread lightly on the things of earth

Allen at The Right Christians alerts me to Rev. Jim Wallis’ Backward Christian soldier: An open letter to the Christian General, Lt. General William “Holy War” Boykin, in response to Boykin’s remarks as noted, for example, at MSNBC and in the LA Times —

General, your theology bears no resemblance to biblical teaching. You utterly confuse the body of Christ with the American nation. The kingdom of God doesn’t endorse the principalities and powers of nation-states, armies, and the ideologies of empire; but rather calls them all into question. …

Brother Boykin, … Why were you never taught in Sunday school about the real meaning of the kingdom of God, and the universality of the body of Christ? And why have you never heard that only peacemaking, not war-making, can be done “in the name of Jesus?” …

When a high-ranking military officer espouses a zealous religious nationalism that claims the name “Christian” for both his nation and his army, and when he invokes the name of Jesus — not to love our enemies as he instructed, but rather to target them for destruction — the church must discipline that errant brother and name his public statements for what they are, not mere political incorrectness, but idolatry.

It occurs to me that if I, too, could do forcible truth-telling like this to brethren who’ve conflated flag and cross, nationalism and religion into an unholy, idolatrous mess as General Boykin has, I’d be doing what I’m called to do. I wouldn’t be in my present predicament of wondering if I can ever return to church.

Thanks for setting a good example, Brother Wallis.

You can’t get much more direct than this:

Once we strip away the now-debunked U.S. justifications for entering Iraq, what we’re left with is an old-fashioned invasion of a foreign country.

Yep. I don’t think it’s ever been much more complicated than that.

The real flaw in the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism … is that it scrupulously avoids addressing the grievances that seem to drive people to terrorism.

Indeed, it never even acknowledges that grievances exist; terrorists are deemed to act out of nothing more than blind hatred and a wish for death.

A handful might, but only a handful; most people, even terrorists, are more complex than this. People do things for reasons that make sense to them; as fellow humans they usually deserve to be acknowledged, engaged, and understood, even if disagreed with.

Dismissing people and their grievances out of hand — as the Bush team habitually does to anyone not in full agreement — would piss off even a Mother Theresa. This fatally flawed black-or-white, you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us thinking has got to go. It does not reflect reality.

My friend Keith has picked up his pen keyboard again at Balaam’s Ass (a reference to Numbers 22). Complete with cool logo. Go, bro.

Woo-hoo, it’s the day of the Panther.

Apple releases Mac OS X 10.3 Panther today. And FedEx tracking tells me my copy is now waiting for me on the porch at home. Yes!

I hardly know how I could like Panther better than its predecessor Jaguar (10.2) that I’m using now, ‘cause Jaguar on a TiBook is pretty damn dreamy. But I’m game to pace the panther, baby. I can use the excitement.

2003-10-27 update:
Panther is indeed wonderful — faster, even more aesthetically pleasing to me than Jaguar (taming the horizontal pinstripes down to almost nothing pleases my eyes), and lets me keep work state through a log out.

Whither uw-imapd? But one important thing doesn’t work: I can’t get my local fink-installed uw-imapd daemon to authenticate connections. This is critical to me as I keep all my mail in local IMAP mailboxes (which I like because it lets me use any IMAP mail client I feel like using at the moment). My hunch is the authentication solution is simple but I don’t see it yet.

    later … I see sbromlin provides a partial Panther authentication
    explanation and a temporary brute-force kludge for uw-imapd.
    Works! Now I can start living in Panther.

[2003-12-02 update: Norman Gall provides a proven Panther-friendly PAM imapd solution at Installing UW imapd/pop3d on MacOS X 10.3 (Panther). Thanks, Norman.]

I like Brad’s post about switching to Linux leading him to buy — surprise — an Apple PowerBook. Agreed, Unix rules: Mac OS X on Apple hardware for hands-on use, Linux (or *BSD) on PC hardware for servers, all seamlessly and almost identically administered — and I’m happy. (Microsoft expunged is icing on the cake.)

Brad links to Mark’s article about Apple’s almost-obsessive attention to “grace and simplicity and aesthetic warmth” instead of hawking “just another suckass hunk of plastic and wire and metal.” Oh, yes. Aesthetics matter. Not to everyone, apparently and inexplicably, but to me — always.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for the progressive Christian writings of Rev. Allen Brill at The Right Christians, The Preacher at Real Live Preacher, and Fr. Bojangles at Le Prêtre Noir.

Now a new delight beckons: Melanie is now writing at Daily Kos, starting with today’s Liberalism and Religion (wherein, BTW, she references each of the above writers) —

Secular liberals, you need to get a clue: there are lots of deeply religious people out here who reliably pull the lever in the voting booth for the straight D[emocratic] ticket. We are Christian evangelicals and Main Line Protestants and Catholics like me, from the Dorothy Day-Peter Maurin-Oscar Romero wing of the Church. We are Jews and Muslims and Sikhs and Buddhists and Jains, pagans, Hindus and, yes, by God, there are even Zoroastrian Democrats in this country. When you make light of religion, you wound a part of us which is very important to us. …

Fundamentalism, be it Christian or Islamic, is only one faction of these faiths, which are not monoliths. Every one of the world’s great faith traditions is an umbrella which covers wide and various theologies and practices. … It is too easy to tar all of Christianity with the broad brush of condemnation of the George Bushes, the Pat Robertsons, the William Boykins. Yes, they own one piece of the large tent which is Christianity, they are not one that I can justify in any way.

Like Melanie, I am also a layperson with a master’s degree in Christian theology. And I have in the past dreamed of being “a spiritual director, retreat director and writer.” But I am still too bogged down in disappointment and anger to write well — or at all.

Melanie causes me to remember that what I’m doing is letting the Christian Right’s fundamentalism (and its embrace of a corrupt U.S. administration) cast a shadow of darkness over my whole experience of the faith. Which isn’t even slightly reasonable.

I hope to be better one day. I expect that my renewed attention to reading these folks will hasten that day for me. Check them out. Thanks, Melanie.

(I also recommend Kynn’s Shock & Awe; I often agree and I always appreciate his style. And I can hardly get enough of Jeanne at Body and Soul. My not-quite-up-to-date blogroll contains dozens of others on my Top 5 list. :-) )

2003-12-05 update:
Melanie now has her own blog, Just a Bump in the Beltway.

I am speechless over this:

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops. …

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: “It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth.”

River of Baghdad Burning hints at the cultural significance:

The death of a palm tree is taken very seriously. Farmers consider it devastating and take the loss very personally. Each tree is so unique, it feels like a member of the family …

Historically, palm trees … are a reminder that no matter how difficult the circumstances, there is hope for life and productivity. The palm trees in the orchards have always stood lofty and resolute — oblivious of heat, political strife or war … until today.

There are very few things in life that could move me to violence, but destroying my family’s orchard would likely be one of them.

Just as sudden as my anger is my sadness; my eyes well up.

[by way of Body and Soul]

Thom Hartmann discusses well the differences between conservative vs. liberal perceptions of morality:

[Conservatives] define [morality] first and foremost in terms of personal behavior: What goes on in people’s bedrooms, what drugs others may be taking in their own living rooms, whether a woman should be allowed to prevent or terminate a pregnancy. In their fervor for these issues, many conservatives think they are the only ones concerned about morality in an otherwise decadent society. …

While personal morality is key in the conservative world-view, public morality is the overarching concern of liberals. Some are so passionate about this morality that they’re led to acts of civil disobedience.

Then Thom mentions a most compelling reason for conservative Christians to rethink/expand their understanding of morality, IMO: Jesus, according to the Gospels, indisputably emphasizes public morality:

Perhaps best summarized in Jesus’ description in Matthew 25 of who will (and who won’t) get into heaven, liberal morality asks: “Are the hungry fed? Does everybody have the housing, clothing, and health-care they need? Are those in prison treated humanely? Are we caring for the “strangers” — the less fortunate or less competent among us — in the same way we’d want to be cared for if we fell on hard times?”

Many liberals would say that what people do in [their] private lives is their own business, and that if we hold to the ancient standard that only those among us without sin may cast stones at those with personal failings, we’ll have a more humane and decent society.

It’s not that personal morality isn’t important. It is. But it’s not a useful behavioral emphasis because we’ve all fallen short. Personal morality is a fruit of the Spirit, an ongoing outcome of a changed life; it’s nothing we can effort into place. (As Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Bennett are learning.)

Public morality, OTOH, is a behavioral choice that’s crucial toward effecting a just and sustainable society. That is, if you’re theologically inclined, toward effecting the real Kingdom of God. Hence, it’s the kind of morality Jesus emphasizes we’ll be judged for.

What I observe here in the U.S., to my dismay and revulsion, is a thoroughgoing lack of public morality among loud conservatives in general and the Bush Administration in particular. There’s no excuse, and there’s no hiding: more and more, by their fruit we recognize them. The time of playing along that black is white, up is down, is drawing to a close.

See also related Farai Chideya encouragement, Avoiding the Rush to Gloat.

2003-10-28 update: Bob Herbert in a New York Times op-ed illustrates present intra-U.S. consequences of this Administration’s lack of public morality quite clearly IMO (also archived at Truthout).

And absolutely square-on to the point: Bill Moyers interviews Union Theological Seminary’s Joseph Hough —

There is a definite intentional move on the part of political leadership in this country … [that] is not at all compatible with the prophetic tradition in Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. And that is the obligation on the part of people who believe in God to care for the least and the poorest. That central teaching, that sacred code, I think, is very well summed up in Proverbs [14:31] where the writer of Proverbs says, “Those who oppress the needy insult their maker.”

Lovely paragraph from Allen at The Right Christians (“It is time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christians”), drawn from an entry in which he muses — with compassion — on the plight of Christian hawk bloggers as they deal with uncertainty and disillusionment in the face of George W. Bush’s claim that he’d “restore honor, dignity and integrity to the White House”:

The Plame Affair reveals the very heart of this administration. While they have claimed to put the security of the nation above all else, even to the point of dragging us into a war with little international support, it is now becoming clearer day by day that the national security is far less important to them than their own political power. Honor, dignity and integrity have vanished like so much mist. Some of us knew it was a mirage all along.

For a brief time many months ago I was sensitive to the eventual, inevitable disillusionment that would befall my pro-Bush-pro-war-at-any-cost friends and acquaintances — especially the ones who are Christian — and I felt compassion for them. Falling headlong into betrayal and disillusionment brings pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But gradually my compassion all leaked away and I was swept into my own quagmire of anger, disappointment, and disengagement.

Lesson for me: Don’t underestimate the power of darkness. It can take us directly, as in leading us to believe things that aren’t true, as thoughtful ones in the Christian Right are discovering about this administration. And it can take us indirectly, as in causing us to give up altogether on those taken directly and to drop out entirely. Either approach severely inhibits us from our goal of loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

I hope I’m learning and growing from this. Actually I hope a lot of us are. What if Bush really does unite us in the end? (That is, unite us in a great revulsion that motivates us, together, to stop his team’s destruction of our country.) I’d call that plot twist a miraculous, supernatural redeeming, a true deliverance.

Meanwhile, though, I admit that my patience with — and forgiveness toward — people still in denial still leaves a hell of a lot to be desired.

Thanks, Allen.