Divine Wisdom calls. It is publicly accessible. We may not recognize the voice because we might not be listening for it. But it is there beckoning to us.
An examination of responses that are counteracting the fascism emboldened by Trumpism; including Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement as well as Christ’s moral imperative for anti-fascist action. A provision of counternarratives of hope to the prevailing motif of the Catholic Right’s resurgence.
You might be forced to accept your place in a fundamentally unfair world, but you should never take the next step to allow the values of that world to become the values that shape and give meaning and purpose to your life
This post is a cataloguing of contemporary fascism which is bolstered by religious ideology. I seek to define it, trace its roots, and remove it from the shadows while inspiring Christian ethical response to counter this plague.
He was on a lifelong pursuit to understand the deepest structures and meaning of existence, along with the place, purpose and destiny of the human being in it. He was troubled by existence. He found it difficult and challenging to understand, liable to so much delusion and perversion.
Jesus’ message was not only spiritually transformative but also politically charged, as it reimagined who held power and how that power should be used—not to marginalize, but to uplift and include.
Is the new materialist language of agential realism really an instance of what Niklaus Largier calls figuration? How did we transition from a use of the term “agent,” meaning conduit or receptive tool, an actor moved by an other, to the term “agential,” meaning immanent to itself, meaning matter that has its own imagination, even its own desire? Largier’s brief investigation of new materialist language in chapter six of Figures of Possibility ultimately serves as a provocative digression, a counterexample underscoring the overall thrust of his book.
The text of 1 Kings 8 is a conversation, not a monologue. For those of us who look to Scripture to guide our understanding and action in our own context, this text invites us to wrestle, conversationally, with the embedded ideologies of our own political leaders’ projects. Names matter in politics. But humble leadership, for the good of all, ought to matter more.
What futures are possible if Largier’s imaginative vision of transformative practice is embraced? Against the stagnating rehearsal of sedimented forms of knowledge production and the force of familiar affective patterns, Largier’s figures offer possibilities as infinite as the bodies they represent.
You discuss a God that both invites us to love our enemies, already incredibly challenging, and a God that also seems to allow, endorse, or sometimes invite violence against the oppressor in certain scriptural texts. Both are hard theological pills to swallow.
Just because leaders appear tough and strong, formidable and forceful, does not mean they have the qualities needed to govern well. Hubris should not trump humility.